Aloompa Insight: Leveraging Festival App Data To Understand Artist Demand

BACKGROUND

From inception, technology innovation in the event industry has been the core goal of Aloompa. Founded in Nashville, TN, in 2009, our product and relationships have been heavily influenced by the music-centric culture which surrounds us. It has always been our mission to deliver an incredible attendee experience through our mobile apps, while also giving our clients an opportunity to learn and grow from their tech-savvy attendees.

Since the start of our company, music festivals have grown exponentially in number and popularity. On April 22, 2015, Billboard published that 32 million people go to at least one festival in the US every year. Nearly half of that population are made up of millennials (14.7 million). At the same time, a study by Harris Interactive revealed that 31% of millennials use their phones for half a festival or longer, while only 15% say they never touch it while there.

Aloompa saw these trends proven correct this year, as we saw an average fest app download rate of 53% for US festivals with reported attendance over 100,000. Additionally, we tracked over 55 million sessions in Aloompa apps, totaling more than 4.8 million hours spent in our apps. In that amount of time, we could go to Pluto and back on the Galileo Spacecraft 35 times!

Our position as one of the leading festival mobile app providers allows us to have a unique view on the industry that many don’t. In 2010, we released a feature to begin keeping track of user’s behavior in aggregate form. In an event app, this could be an attendee liking or scheduling an artist. In a few cases, we exposed this data in the apps themselves as a feature that had festival-specific leaderboards/top charts. Not only did attendees think the feature was interesting, but we soon learned that many industry professionals took notice. Since 2010, we’ve continued to hear feedback that this data was becoming more insightful in helping events inform a portion of their decision based on users behavior in an event app.

When looking throughout the industry, it has become easier to find charts ranking song streaming totals, album downloads, total tickets sold, and data from social networks, but a key source of entertainment, the growing market of large scale events, has been left out. Why do so many millennials attend festivals? What artists are they there to see? How did they choose to spend their time? Our research led us to creating what we are calling, the Aloompa 2015 Festival Demand Report.

BEHIND THE NUMBERS

To begin our process, we chose a group of our Top 50 most popular festivals based on total app sessions, general festival size, and festival type. Next, we aggregated the schedule data from each attendee’s ‘My Schedule’ section. Within each Aloompa app, an attendee has the ability to create their own schedule. This functionality makes it easy for attendees to keep track of the artists they are most excited to see. Using this data, we developed a proprietary weighted score that takes into account the number of attendees that added an artist to their schedule, the number of total schedules created, and the total number of festivals played in 2015. The result allowed us to see an artist’s “Popularity Share” of a festival lineup, the most “In Demand” artists across an entire genre, and an aggregated Top 100.

Overall, EDM led all genres with 31% of total artists, but quickly followed by Country and Pop. This parity re-enforces the changing landscape of music festivals that we are all experiencing in the multi-faceted lineups. While one genre may dominate a particular festival, gone are the days of a festival with a single genre; there is now something for everyone to enjoy.

When reviewing these charts, it’s important to remember a couple of items that may cause you to, rightly, question their contents. Aloompa is the first to admit that we have embarked on a journey of answering questions in a defensible way, NOT making headline grabbing declarations. Starting with a defensible base, we are actively working to improve our methods and weighted score to further refine the results.

• The data shows an artist share of the total attendee schedules created at the Top 50 festivals. It does not measure the complete popularity of an artist overall in the universe, but it does measure their relative demand to other artists on that lineup.
• Certain artists weight “could” be affected by outlying factors. For example, Paul McCartney fans could be less likely to use an app compared to Imagine Dragon fans. Other factors could include: festival size, performance slot, festival location, genre, etc.
• Viewing by genre is the safe way to begin the exploration of the data today. We don’t want you to get caught up in thinking Miranda Lambert is more popular than X pop act if you just don’t like country music, yet.

BREAKOUT ARTIST OF THE YEAR

An outcome of our research was the ability to watch an artist’s demand increase and decrease throughout the 2015 festival season. After looking across the entire Top 50 festivals we analyzed , we quickly spotted an artist whose growth was notably substantial. In total, ODESZA’s weighted score grew 438% at festivals in 2015, making them our Breakout Artist of 2015.

THE FUTURE

As Aloompa begins the 2016 festival season, all of us are excited to continue looking forward. In addition to continuing our work of providing the most advanced mobile apps in the industry, we are focusing our growth on providing data-driven results. As a commitment to this we are excited to announce that we will continue to publish the Aloompa Festival Demand Report on a quarterly basis. The data will allow the decision makers in the industry to get tangible visibility into the growth of artists throughout the year, and see how these artists stack up against one another. Our hope is that this will become just another tool that the industry can utilize to make smart decisions and we will continue our work towards adding more advanced metrics along the way.

Presence is Aloompa’s proximity solution, which utilizes bluetooth beacons and geofences to allow festivals and events to track how attendees interact and experience live events. We spent a large portion of 2015 mastering the science that goes into a Presence deployment at over 30 festivals and live events. In total, we deployed over 2,000 beacons at festivals, 300 geofences, and collected over 20 million proximity data points. By using proximity sensors deployed correctly, an event can begin to bridge the gap between what an attendees said they were going to do to what they actually did (and for how long). See the chart below of the Top 5 Artists By Audience Retention at festivals in 2015.

We believe these types of metrics will be an integral part of of how the music industry will make decisions in the future. This data showcases actual behaviors of attendees at an event, which gives insight into behavior we have never seen before. Our hope is to aid the industry as a whole to better understand the relationship between the artist, the fan and the festival. We’re excited to continue down the path and share our findings with you along the way!

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