The first Flattr QR experience by Snild Dolkow

We mentioned the pioneer Flattr QR experiment on the Malmö Festival before, and after the gig, here is the whole story and some advice straight from the artist, Snild Dolkow.

The gig was amazing!

There were a fair amount of people from the start, but the crowd grew over the hour. I even got to do an encore — they requested the last song again. One guy shouted “play it backwards!”.

So I got a lot of great response. I even had random people coming up to me a few hours later in the night, in another part of town, telling me how much I kicked ass. Which, of course, felt fantastic.

About the QR stuff:
I’ve had Flattr buttons for all my released DS-10 tracks for quite a while now, so when I knew I was going to play Malmöfestivalen, I wanted to try to allow people to flattr that too. I had heard about FlattrIRL before, and checked it out. I was immediately sold on the idea. Talked about it with a couple of tech-savvy friends (i.e. people who are excited about Flattr), and they agreed.

So, I got in contact with Marie who I’d seen posting on the FlattrChattr blog and told her about my idea. My goal there was to get some attention on the blog, both in order to boost my audience numbers and to get some more Flattr-enabled people there. I also started thinking about the design of the QR poster I was going to print.

I submitted a Flattr thing called “Snild Dolkow @ Malmöfestivalen 2011” some time in June, and based my design on the QR code PDF on the official Flattr site. The QR code was a bit too small there, so I reduced the size of the little arrows, and enlarged the QR.

After a while, Marie forwarded me to Zsofi, who sent me a couple of PDFs for posters that they had used in the past. I liked the green “Scan this to flattr this artist” one, and decided to make a couple of smaller posters with that design.

I was looking for a cheap place to get the stuff printed. I was expecting it to be pretty pricey, but the places I checked out were still more expensive. So I was pretty happy when Zsofi made an offer for Flattr to sponsor the printing of the posters. I chose an online printer who promised quick delivery and was pretty cheap compared to the others.

When I was just about to place my order, I realized that “Snild Dolkow @ Malmöfestivalen 2011” was a bit too specific. It would mean that I could never reuse the posters — a colossal waste. So I submitted a new Flattr thing called “Snild Dolkow LIVE” — much better.

A couple of days later, I got the posters in the mail — and they were huge. Very cool.

When the actual gig was approaching, I had my mind so full of things that I nearly forgot about the posters. One of the people involved in planning the evening reminded me about 10 minutes before I was going up (thanks, Pierre!). So I panicked, grabbed the nearest acquaintance who didn’t look busy, and asked him to help me put them up after Zalza, the guy who was playing before me.

The “tent” I was playing in wasn’t really a tent as I imagine it — it didn’t really have any walls. The three smaller posters were put up on the fence below the stage, and weren’t very visible once the crowd had built up. The larger poster was attached to the table I had on stage, and was pretty visible with the huge Flattr logo and all.

In the end, it worked out fine. The posters were up when I started playing, and I got a grand total of six Flattrs. Not hugely impressive, but I’m still very happy with it. The part of a venn diagram where “Flattr users with QR scanner” and “Malmöfestivalen attendees” overlap is probably pretty small anyway. :)

Tips for other people:
* Make sure you can use the posters more than once.
* Don’t forget your posters when it’s time
* Make sure the Flattr logo is fairly visible — it’ll encourage Flattr users to scan, and may make other QR scanning people extra curious.

So a big thanks for Snild for his try of the Flattr QR and sharing the story. Don’t forget, if you have plans displaying QR codes for a bigger audience, we may cover your printing costs!

If you would like to see more pictures from the event you can find some here and here. You can even watch a video of the whole gig on Bambuser (Snild starts at around 50 min).

If you like his music, experiment with the QRs, or simply want to say congrats — Flattr him. You can also show your like on Facebook.

Images from Petar Mataic and Mathias Heinel. Thanks for them!