Insights for Sore Eyes

As the business rubs the sleep from its collective eyes after an 18-month-long slumber, talks to some of the companies helping live music professionals learn more about their audiences and improve their fans’ experience.

With restrictions on events gradually coming to an end and shows and festivals restarting across much of the world, promoters and venues are finally getting back to business after a year-and-a-half-long shutdown unprecedented in the history of the concert business.

Also getting ready for a return to something approaching normality are the clever companies behind the software and hardware solutions that help concert businesses learn more about their audiences before, during, and after their events – many of which have used the enforced hibernation of the coronavirus period to tinker with, finesse, and add new functionalities to their already feature-rich products, they tell IQ.

Pascal de Mul, CEO of Exit Live, explains that his company is filling the space left by the decline of physical media to provide fans with a digital souvenir of their favourite shows.

“Live music recordings used to be a major release platform, but streaming has refocused the industry and the fans on studio recordings. Today, there are no good places to find quality live recordings,” he says “The CD at the door and the bootleg cassettes are gone, with nothing to replace them.

“We created a platform that is 100% focused on celebrating the best audio recordings of live music, and have done it with a passion for the artist first. Performers and songwriters are in control, receive 70% of all proceeds, and can receive this immediately through our ‘pay me now’ button. Once a transaction is made, the funds are available immediately. Artists do not have to wait to be remunerated; they can be rewarded instantly. We believe the artist deserves full control and that is our ethos.”

OnePlan, says CEO Paul Foster, provides analytics on fan engagement at the time of ticket purchase, connecting to a venue’s ticketing platform via its Venue Twin solution.

“OnePlan is a collaborative festival planning platform that enables teams, partners, and all stakeholders to plan their events in one system,” he explains. “It’s centimetre-accurate and easy to use, with all the infrastructure and objects you need, plus real-time event analytics.” OnePlan “seamlessly connects with our hyper--realistic, interactive 3D platform, Venue Twin, including the most advanced 3D SeatView when buying tickets.”

“Festivals have till now been planned in non-specialist tools, with screenshots of maps emailed back and forth. OnePlan massively simplifies and improves the event planning process,” he adds “ensuring your team and stakeholders all have one single source-of-truth for the entire festival and any scenario.

“Venue Twin is a game-changer for stadiums and arenas, with incredible hyper-realistic digital twins of the venue that can be used for operational planning, customer walk-throughs from any angle, easy-to-change signage and branding and more. It even enables light and sound production planning for concerts.”

“Given Exit Live is a global platform, any artist utilising our tool will be able to see where in the world fans are most likely to buy an audio recording,” says De Mul, outlining Exit Live’s audience insight capabilities. “Even beyond this, an artist will be able to judge pricing structures to sell audio live show recordings by measuring the success of the sell-through of shows. This can help to boost sales whereby the pricing to fans will be agreed at a point that works for everyone.

“Also, over time, as artists upload more and more live show recordings, more data will be received, which will showcase which shows were most popular with fans. Again, this will help to inform any future decision to promote any historical shows in a different way.”

Zack Sabban, CEO of Festicket and subsidiary Event Genius, identifies a number of Event Genius solutions, including egMarketing, egTicketing, egTravel and egPay, that he says will help “to build strong and clear profiles of fans throughout the life cycle of the events that they attend.”§

“Perhaps the most fruitful area for audience insights comes via our cashless solution, offering venues, event organisers and promoters, access to a wealth of data usually reserved for the big banks,” he says. “Putting this data in the hands of venues and promoters is very powerful; our cashless offering is as much about delivering a better fan experience as it is about regaining ownership of data and insight that promoters and venue owners can usually never gain access to.

“By offering a greater understanding of customers’ spending habits, we can help venues and promoters to deliver a better fan experience, using data to build different profiles of customers – favourite products, food, drink, merchandise, etc – to ascertain how to best serve these audiences and adapt accordingly, as well as offering insights into which customers are the biggest spenders and those that offer the greatest value. All of this data across the fan experience, from discovery through to on-the-day purchases, offers the opportunity to engage with audiences in new and creative ways before, during, and after events, via rewards, incentives, gamification and more.”

Festicket’s ticketing and travel businesses, meanwhile, “can help to build a picture of the audience for an event, whether that’s through traditional demographics like age or gender,

Viberate is confident its data analysis tools can help event organisers maximise their profit margins

“…always stay flexible. Be open to new ways of using technology you have already built and be open to expanding beyond your initial target market”

Claudia Bacco | ComeTogether

or more detailed insights into where fans are travelling from the split between domestic and international audiences; and even the preferences and budgets when it comes to VIP tickets, accommodation options, and extras. We can also offer insights into spending behaviours in terms of what proportion of fans make use of payment plans to spread the cost of their booking over instalments,” says Sabban.

ComeTogether’s ticketing solution uses cryptocurrency-like blockchain technology to give event organisers complete control over a ticket and its life cycle. It also offers tickets as NFTs (non-fungible tokens), with other concert content, such as video and augmented-reality (AR) experiences, also available in the in-vogue collectible format.

With ComeTogether, event organisers are able to “conduct targeted marketing for future events and to better understand the demographics of attendees,” says ComeTogether’s CMO, Claudia Bacco. “All information is tracked in accordance with GDPR and information can be anonymised as needed. Examples of details that can be provided include who used the ticket to attend the event; the type of ticket purchased; where they sat; whether the ticket was purchased in the primary or secondary market and how much they paid for it; and if they purchased a group of tickets this information would be linked to show who joined as a group.”

Viberate monitors all major social, streaming and other music channels – including radio, Spotify, Beatport, Instagram, YouTube, SoundCloud and Twitter – and uses the data to determine how each music artist is performing online, and how they rank in popularity compared to other similar artists.

“We measure [the artists’] fanbase growth and engagement for each of those channels through time, so it’s easy for anyone to track their promotional and growth efforts in one place,” comments Vasja Veber, Viberate co-founder and business development director. “We go even deeper into breaking down fans by accurately pinpointing where they come from – by country and city – what age they are, and what gender they are.

“One major thing is that we listened to the artists and labels and really focused our efforts building extensive analytics for Spotify, radio and Beatport, and we can say that we managed to do that – we really covered everything.”

He adds, “All this information is very useful when artists or their teams want to promote new releases and other ventures, assess past gigs and promotional activities, or look for specific cities that have the most potential for future gigs.”

Despite its focus on recorded/streaming music channels, Veber says Viberate has been affected by restrictions on concerts during the pandemic. “The live music industry was hit hard, and since events and festivals were a big chunk of our business, we had to adapt quickly. “Now,

automated calculations for entrance and exit.”

Sabban explains that Event Genius spent its pandemic downtime “evaluat[ing] our offering in light of the lasting changes that Covid-19 will inevitably have on the live events industry. We made a series of innovations to our services to make sure we had a completely Covid-ready solution for event organisers. Things like reduced contact between staff and eventgoers suddenly became a huge part of an event experience, so we invested heavily in things like unmanned top-up stations, contactless payments, and selfscan contactless ticket and wristband scanning.

“We wanted to make sure we were able to reassure fans and staff that they were attending an event that felt safe. We developed time-slot-specific tickets to help maintain social distancing and improve attendee flow, while also making sure promoters could be fully [contact tracing] compliant with us.”

For ComeTogether, coronavirus lockdowns were initially “a complete halt to our business,” according to Bacco, with the company undergoing a “short-term pivot to focus on the development of Covid-19 certificates to support health access control based on our blockchain engine. This solution was made available as a standalone app, and also combined with the main digital ticketing app.

“As the industry started to reopen, we [found ourselves] ahead of solutions that don’t offer as many options to implement this functionality.” What makes ComeTogether unique, she adds, is the “ability to have a single digital ticketing solution that also supports health access control and NFT collectibles through a single app. The app can be provided as a white-label solution to promote individual branding, and NFT solutions can be customised to the event, audience or topic.”

De Mul says that the shutdown, despite the proliferation of live-streamed events, underlined the importance of live shows for both performers and fans.

“What the pandemic has shown us is that

Festicket/Event Genius has rolled out its egPay cashless tool to bolster its onsite credentials

with things slowly picking up, we’re happy to notice that a lot of music professionals have turned to data and tech in general to help them navigate their online presence.

“The music business has always been notoriously slow at adopting tech solutions, but the adoption and use of analytics has now leapt forward by at least five years.”

Foster says OnePlan, which is used by over 2,000 events in 50 countries, including music festivals in the UK and US, has also seen increased demand for its solutions as promoters sought to minimise travel after March 2020.

“The global pandemic has made it much more difficult for promoters to visit venues for site visits,” he explains. “Venue Twin provides perfectly realistic virtual site visits, massively reducing the need to travel and significantly cutting costs.”

OnePlan, Foster adds, has also developed a “social distancing toolkit” that event organisers can use to plan the flow of attendees, including with

Festicket has integrated with Spotify to help fans discover festivals that might appeal to their musical tastes

“Never before has technology allowed so many fans to get so close to their idols”

Pascal de Mul | Exit Live

live shows are very important to artists and the music industry. As an artist, it is within the live show where a real connection with the fan is made,” he comments. “This cannot be replicated in any other format.

“With the return of live music, we are excited to support artists and share content with fans and audiences once again.”

Having “worked with thousands of partners across more than 50 countries,” including festivals such as Coachella, Tomorrowland, Mad Cool, Afro Nation and Rolling Loud, and promoters like AEG and Untitled Group, Festicket and Event Genius are now looking at other business areas, including striking agreements with artists directly, says Sabban. “Because our platform is versatile we’re always looking to explore other verticals, and we’re currently working on deals with some globally renowned artists, so being a part of more global tours like these is something we’d definitely like to do more of,” he explains. “There’s also scope for events that aren’t music-based: seasonal events, attractions and the like.”

Viberate, which is currently offering a 30-day free trial of its fully featured Viberate Premium service, is “in the final stages of launching a personalised professional feed that will deliver unique and up-to-date information for every single registered user,” reveals Veber.

“Apart from the feed feature, we’re currently working on adding several other features to the platform, such as TikTok Analytics, Facebook Analytics, the most comprehensive YouTube analytics available, as well as the data export feature,” he adds. “We expect to roll everything out in the coming months.”

“The main lesson learned” over the past 18 months by the team at ComeTogether, which prior to the pandemic had provided its solution to 14 events in Greece, is “to always stay flexible. Be open to new ways of using technology you have already built, and be open to expanding beyond your initial target market,” says Bacco.

De Mul, meanwhile, is looking forward to the return of live music, as well as new audio technologies that will enable fans to hear live recordings in a higher quality than possible before: “New digital technology, spatial audio and HD-quality [sound] all contribute to the intensity and intimacy” of the recordings, he says. “Never before has technology allowed so many fans to get so close to their idols. Fans wanting to relive those incredible live music experiences will truly benefit from Exit Live, and will do so in the assurance that their artists will receive a fair deal.” Ultimately, he concludes, “there is nothing like the energy of live music. In person, or as a recording, hearing an artist or band at their creative peak is exciting and exhilarating like nothing else.”

CONTRIBUTORS

CLAUDIA BACCO | COMETOGETHER PASCAL DE MUL | EXIT LIVE PAUL FOSTER | ONEPLAN ZACK SABBAN | FESTICKET/EVENT GENIUS VASJA VEBER | VIBERATE