The rough format of the following email will be familiar to anyone involved in live music:
“Artist X taking bookings for a European tour, inquire for available dates for Nov/Dec”
Throw in an image and a couple of Youtube links, who could turn down this gilt-edged offer? Right? The logic behind this approach in the digital era is baffling. It relies on a promoter taking a gamble based purely on their knowledge of the local scene’s appetite for the artist. This scattershot method extends the time it takes to find and secure bookings and produces varied results.
Artist managers have access at the very least basic demographic and geographic data from Spotify, Apple, Soundcloud, Shazam and other partners in the music ecosystem. They wouldn’t dream of going into a meeting with a potential brand sponsor without that key data, so why isn’t this being applied to the process of booking live tours? It suggests something of a disconnect, that technological development in infrastructure which improves the live experience for fans and artists hasn’t kept pace with advances in tech for recorded music consumption, for example.
A senior executive at a digital music marketing platform recently asked me ‘if there is really room for all the music blockchain companies in the market’? While there will be inevitable consolidation, the answer lies in the varied range of applications and real-world uses we’re collectively researching and building, rather than the technology that underpins them. You ‘look something up on the internet’ you don’t ‘research via TCPIP’. Spotify is a music streaming service, not a client for distributing OggVorbis files via servers.
Soundeon’s layers can support and enhance the value of that relationship between fan engagement, recorded music, historical performance data and targeted, informed live promotion activity in the future.
— Soundeon Ticketing doesn’t just prevent fraud and ticket scalping, they present new opportunities to fund live shows, mobilize an audience and extract richer data from the exercise.
— Soundeon Monitor will help with visualizing and analyzing everything from streaming data to concert attendance.
— Soundeon Exchange and Fanvesting provide new avenues of funding and engagement but also add other data points and ways of identifying superfans.
The combination of these factors offers new ways to approach common challenges in the music industry at large but also opportunities for new strategies. For instance, an artist might identify a city where for economic reasons their fee will be relatively low but where there is a concentration of fans that isn’t reflected in streaming performance. A live show in this city could promote streaming, result in physical and merch sales. Far more valuable than playing to an audience of 10 elsewhere because a promoter/fan with deep pockets happened to receive a booking agent’s email. Researching and developing new markets can have far-reaching effects for the longevity of a career.
I hope therefore, it’s not too long before a typical email from a booking agent will read something more like this:
‘Artist X available for Barcelona dates in November. Artist X has 118,000 monthly listeners in Barcelona (8th highest in Europe for this act), 20% of tickets pre-sold. Three engaged local superfans we can connect you with’
This is a much more attractive proposition, giving the artist/manager/booker more leverage and the promoter more to base their decision on. Booking a tour, therefore, becomes less about who has the budget and more about who does the best job. Healthy competition that can mean better venues, sound, promo efforts and returns for the artist and promoter.
In the grand scheme, Soundeon and the music industry collectively is only just beginning this journey and perhaps the dream outlined above is some way in the distance for now. The journey has begun in earnest.
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