 Hello. Welcome back. I'm Chaya, and I'm the COO and Events Director at Future Music Coalition. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So I'm here to introduce the music tech demonstrations. So ever since music went digital, there's been an explosion of online platforms and widgets to make life easier for musicians. Many of the early tools were aimed at simply getting music to fans, but now we're seeing the proliferation of services that aim to assist artists with everything from money management to touring, to websites, to fan communications, and e-commerce. Today we'll explore a handful of those services and get some instant feedback from our panel of experts, who will each be giving a five minute presentation, and then we'll hear from our panel of reactors who are also going to sit in the front row, and then we'll move on to the next presentation. So please join me in welcoming our four presentations by Chris McDonald, CEO and co-founder of HugeFan. Sorry, no, I'm just going to run through the names first. Brooke Parrott, artist ambassador from Songkick, and also of Loc Lamond. Thank you. Matt Ermey, co-founder and CEO of Artist Growth. Jesse Von Doom, co-executive director of Cache Music. And I will let Brian Calhoun, our moderator, introduce our reaction panel. All right. This is a very exciting panel to me. This is one of the coolest things. On a regular basis, I, in my role at the Blueprint Group, which is an artist management company, we talk with technology companies and businesses that are trying to do business with the artists and labels that we represent. And so it's going to be a lot of fun. We did this last year and had a really good time, but kind of on a day-to-day basis, this is what we do. We get presentations and then we grill the people who are making the presentations and try to determine why or why not our artists should use the platform. So what I'm going to do just real quickly is ask my reaction panelists to introduce themselves. And then, as Chai said, what we're going to do is we're going to go through and do the presentations. Each one will have five minutes, and then there will be ten minutes of Q&A from the reaction panelists. So I think I'll bring the microphone down to you guys and you can introduce yourselves. Hi, everyone. Can you hear me? I'm Will Eastman. I'm a DJ and music producer based here in Washington, D.C. I'm also one-third of the group Volta Bureau and owner of U Street Music Hall, a small underground venue on U Street 500 capacity. Hi, my name is Emily White. I run a management and consulting company called White Smith Entertainment. We manage musicians, comedians, and an athlete and are based in New York and Los Angeles. And I also run a label publishing and film company called Readymade Records with Brennan Benson. Hello, my name is Gerald Muller. I own a record label, New Jazz Entertainment, distributed through Universal Music Group. And we have a number of National Endowment of the Arts Jazz Masters, like three out of the five Marcellus family. And through the management company, New Jazz Management, we've managed artists like Lauren Hill, a few of the Marcelluses, about 20 other artists. All right. And I was also asked to mention that unfortunately Chad Clark couldn't be here because he's ill, so our thoughts are with him to get better. And I think with that, we'll go ahead and get things started with... I forgot to mention... Okay, all right. I'm a board member on Cache Music, but I was saying in the green room, I think one reason why Jesse wanted me on the board of Cache as a manager is, if it doesn't make sense to me, it's not going to make sense to anyone. So anyway, I'll try to be as not biased as possible. Sorry. My group, Volta Bureau, was featured in the launch video for Huge Fan. I'm actually apparently the only one not in conflict with anybody. All right. Okay, great. And I guess let's go ahead and get things started with artist growth. This is the mover. I'm guessing? Okay. Okay, so artist growth has been around since January of this year. So we're very young in terms of our platform and our technology is very new. And it's something that we build very quickly. My background is as a touring artist. My co-founder's background is as a touring artist. And the reason that we started thinking about building a tool like this was because of all the services that were emerging over the last several years, what we didn't have was something to help us keep track of the small day-to-day logistics when you're out there on the road. So whether that's taking pictures of receipts and storing them in the cloud or communicating with promoters, radio and publicists, et cetera, people that we were working with. So we set out to build a platform. And one thing we knew when we thought about building a platform, since none of our backgrounds were in technology, none of us were programmers or software developers, was that we knew we wanted it to be mobile and we knew we wanted it to scale it from a phone out to the web and not try to do it the other way around. And this slide is sort of, and I call it the myth, this is sort of what really prompted us into actually going into development, raising money to build a product was this idea that if you're an artist that now that there are e-commerce tools out there and there's digital distribution and these sorts of things, that you now have everything you need in order to have a successful career in the music industry. While that's potentially true, I think the axiom applies that if you give a small child a bucket of blocks, they aren't going to build the Empire State Building. They're going to build something that's going to fall over really quickly. So the idea is that they don't know how to use the tools. There are certain protocols in any industry. There are certain ways you do things from sales to accounting and finances. I didn't have these expertise. I studied poetry in college. I didn't study finance and accounting. So we were frustrated with this idea that, oh, we've given you everything you need. Now go make your career a direct fan. Even though all of those tools are wonderful and I'm friends with the guys who build those tools. So we were looking at it and we thought, well, music content technology has exploded but there hasn't been a whole lot of business technology. There hasn't been a whole lot of backend management stuff built for artists to learn how to use the forward-facing commerce tools and marketing tools and distribution tools so they can actually make wise decisions, learn about sales, learn about these things. So we wanted to build something that was not just focused on content but business. And this slide is just to kind of give you an idea of where I was coming from when I designed this platform and the word paradigm has been used a lot in this industry. This shift, this movement from a closed industry to an open industry and all of that's true and I do believe that an empowered artist and a society of empowered artists equals an empowered business structure and an empowered industry. What I think of as an empowered artist is not an artist who has access to a bunch of tools but knows how to use them appropriately and has them delivered in a way that is sort of presented in a way that is like other things they use in their daily life. So it's not a big learning curve. They can kind of jump right in. So the first thing we built was a mobile app. This was sort of our first iteration of the platform. It was based on six modules. You can't really see them but it was around scheduling, finances, industry search database that we connected to and your performances. And then we had two other modules. One was called AGTV which is basically this library of video content, PDFs, just all the stuff provided by different experts in the industry, producers, engineers, studio owners, record label executives, lawyers. So people could go in on their mobile phone and they could tap it and they could just watch through this content. And then we had a thing called Action Packs where we basically met with experts and we put together lists of things to do, whether it was promoting a show. So when you added a gig to your schedule, you could promote it, land it on your schedule at the time point you were supposed to do it. And then it was hyperlinked to a video of an expert promoter telling you what to say and what not to say when you call the radio station for the first time. Those kinds of things. I put the little praying mantis on there because like I said, you know, I was a poetry major. We were touring songwriters and all of a sudden dove into this world of software development. And so we launched it. We built it in five months on Android, iOS and lightly on the web. And once we got three, four thousand users in the first quarter that we were out there, we realized these bugs were coming back in and we had to start to manage to learn how to build something that would work as it scaled. So we went through this process of fixing bugs and dealing with bugs at the same time, trying to build out our vision of getting to the web. And in the process of that, we started talking to professional managers. We ended up building a solution for agencies. Vector management was the first agency that adopted this platform for their roster. They use it today currently as do a couple others. And what we'll be launching soon, you see here, is a new web, actual web platform that's synced to our mobile apps and all of our enterprise tools, which is creating really unprecedented levels of data integration and correlative analysis. I've spent the better part of the summer making partnerships with a lot of these companies. Some of them aren't listed here to where data is going to be piping in. Data is going to be going out. It's really going to be a level of integration that's never existed before that I'm super pumped about. This is a screenshot of one of our report center, so you can do real correlative analysis based on your sales, with your web traffic, your social imprint, and it comes back in a really digestible way and gives artists some sort of leverage tool when they're looking for investment that they can go and actually quantify their value and deal with money people to move their career forward. So that's it real quick. All right, great. Thanks so much. And I'm going to now turn it over to my reaction panel to react. I noticed on your slide with the graph it had a, with expenses, a negative net, a very accurate slide for a touring artist. So if I understand correctly, your app, it's an app based. You download it from iTunes. It's on your phone, right? Yep, currently. So right now you download it from the iTunes App Store or the Android Marketplace. Or you can go to the website and you can create your own little account there. And then it will sync through a web service to the mobile apps. Okay. And in terms of user interface, so like I have a group with two other guys and a manager and a booking agent. How does this work when multiple users are logging in and changing data? Right. So everybody who is associated with an account has assigned a level of permission that dictates what data they can see and what data they can change. And so when they log into the account, certain things are just not accessible to them or not presented at all. And for instance, in this new platform, in the new iteration of the dashboard, you see down here there's sort of this activity feed in the bottom right where you can post statuses of things that you're doing and it will ping the people's phones and the team. One of those things would be closing out a show at the end of the night. That data would appear in that feed. But if you didn't have the permission to see or work with financials, it wouldn't appear in your feed. So the team is able to determine who sees what. And for example, Vector, they have several different levels of managers working with several different artists. And so they all need different kinds of access and different ways to export calendars and all those kinds of things that come with day to day. So what fees do you charge? How do you make money? Well, right now for the mobile app, we haven't charged. We haven't charged all year. We've let people use it for free. We've got thousands and thousands of users. We get feedback from them on a daily basis and we've been trying to refine and understand really what was being used, what wasn't. Analyzing the data. For instance, AGTV, the videos, the educational component, was watched so much, but people weren't really using the industry search database like we thought they would. So we've been learning and letting people use it for free. The enterprise product we do charge for, and that's just an individual sales channel. So depending on the length of the contract they sign with us, the number of artists they're going to be using, the number of the size of their management agency, how much personal customer support. So we give our enterprise agencies their own team of humans that actually help them work with the software, work with their artists and make sure their thing is running. So that human element has a cost. It just depends. When we launch this new product there will be some prices associated with it. We're keeping it cheap and that's part of the network of partnerships that we've been building is depending on who else you're working with. So if you have a topspin account, a tunecore account or you're in groups as your distribution and you're using topspin for something or pledge music to fund your music and you're also using artist growth, we're all working together to keep it cheap for the artists. So not only are we sharing data for the artists that we share in common but we're trying to give each other price breaks and discounts. So it would never go over $10 a month from my side for an artist. But if you're with partners, people I work with, that can come down even depending on the nature of the relationship. I don't want to hog this. Just one more quick question. In terms of logistics, what sort of interface does it have in terms of that? For me personally, one of the biggest challenges being out on the road is like, okay, how long does it take to get from this airport, from where I'm staying at this hotel to this airport to the venue? How much time do I need to a lot? What's the best way to get there, et cetera? Just having a field for notes. All right, leave 45 minutes early. Leave from here. Take this route or whatever. Right. So in the day sheet or in the schedule, module as it were in the system, there's a place to put notes and things like that. As far as automating the process of directions and things like that, we have these conversations every day in our meetings. Do we want to try to bring Google Maps in here? Do we want to try to fight Google Maps? Are people just going to open up Google Maps? Because that's what they've been doing for years and that's what they do. So let's put our investment and our time and resources into developing something that does not yet exist. You know, in the future of the digital ecosystem, I love hearing that word because it's really happening and it's solidifying. And the application protocol interface that is going to be how we all connect and are able to move data around to give artists access to what they need when they need it. And that's the goal. It's a little hard for me to comment on this without actually playing with it and doing a real demo. But I do like how you've integrated, you know, with so many of the companies that we work with as artists and managers. This is probably more an opinion. I guess it's all an opinion. But I didn't see the need to kind of dis-direct a fan because that's just, we all realize that's a piece of the puzzle. Oh, it's amazing. I mean, it is amazing, but I think the myth that a lot of independent artists who aren't like the entrepreneurial level of artists, you know, the people who are out there and understand a little bit about business, most of these artists out there don't know what they're doing. They're really struggling and they pay for one service for six months and they don't know how to use it right. So they're frustrated and they drop it and they go to a new one and they pay for it and they don't know how to use it right because they don't know anything about sales. Well, they can pick up Ariel Hyatt's book, you know. Yeah, and she's in our AGTV and I love Ariel. And that's something that I think makes direct a fan so powerful is when people start to learn how to use them, you know. Right. And I think most artists would agree that they're getting some revenue from that, some from digital retail, you know, some from the road. I totally agree. Didn't mean to diss it. Just kind of setting the stage for why we didn't build another content distribution platform. Right. I assume there's some sort of level for tour managers. Yes, yeah. So right now in the mobile apps, what we released for, you know, independence to use, there's limited permissions. So it would be like you're an admin, you're a feed-only or you're an owner of the account. When we built the enterprise one that, say, Vector's using, they have the tour manager, so many different levels of permissions. And so we built stuff for people to be able to use it in that way. And that's all web. So that's not even a native app. That's all responsive mobile web, which makes it a lot easier to build out all those layers of who can do what and see what. Right. Yeah, I mean obviously managers are certainly part of your target. And I think it's great that you've been demoing because there's day-to-day managers, there's Ken, there's interns. So that's certainly important. And yeah, I think it was a really smart point to bring up that all this data and everything you're putting together is great leverage for an artist when they are looking for a bigger partner. So that's smart. But yeah, it's hard for me to really dig in with this without trying it, which I'd love to try it. Absolutely. Yeah, I want you all to try it and tell us what you don't like about it and what you do. And we really look at anybody as an artist online as a potential partner, as somebody that if we share an artist in common, then we should be doing something to help that artist get the data they need when they need it and help teach them how to use these tools. I mean, that's really where it comes from at the end of the day. One more. What genre related tools have you developed specifically? When I'm dealing with something like I have a number of different artists across a wide range of genres. The tools that I need when I'm dealing with something like the Duke Ellington Estate are much different than I deal with something like if I'm dealing with Winton Marcellus. The tools that I need for Winton Marcellus are much different than when I'm dealing with somebody like Lauren Hill. So what genre related tools have you specifically developed to help artist managers in between them? That's been a tough thing and we talk about that a lot. How do you serve the needs of a DJ with a software platform and the needs of a folk singer and where they're coming out psychologically to technology? The people they're dealing with in their market and how they work. I mean, it's really complicated and complex. I think what we're just trying to do right now is take in as much information from everybody in those sectors of the industry as we possibly can. So we can understand what nuances do you want and then how can we put that into a system that would be valuable to the majority of our users. So I would say like I would sit down with you and try to learn everything I could learn about what each of your different kinds of artists need. What are the nuances about the promoters they work with, their day-to-days looking at finances and then see where we can build those nuances into the system to make it better for everybody. With the capability to manage the rule, is that just for managing royalty payments or calculations? No, so we do ad hoc revenues where you can just like quick ad revenue. If you spend money, you can pop a picture of a receipt, categorize it, stores it in the cloud, you can print out a report of all your receipts in a PDF with location date stamped on it. At the end of the year you can export it to Excel to go into any of your financial stuff. As well as you can, you know, we did deal with the PROs to where you can at the end of the night, we boiled down the live performance royalty registration process. So is that just expenditures in regards to the touring cost or I mean royalty stations or is that the royalties in regards to record companies that have those or things of that nature? Yeah, if we can get an API for it we will pipe the data in. The only real royalty API we have right now is the live performance royalty registration with the performing rights organizations. We're the first company that they have been willing to give a direct API to their databases and allow us to let artists submit their performances and playlists for live performance royalties. And we've been able to boil that down to one click, which is if you've ever tried to do it on BMI's in the past, it's a long process. It's like 30 or so clicks per song, per playlist and it's hard when you're out there on the road especially if you're an independent to go back and retroactively enter all of those playlists. My last question of comment is how do I deal with the interactivity if I have 20 different artists and let's say some of the artists have one service to do one aspect and another artist has a different service to do the exact same aspect. How do I deal with those multiple artists in between by using one account? Right. So if you look at this screen, like you would have all like the landing page would be an icon of all of your artists. You would tap them and it would take you into their account. So you can really quickly navigate between the artists on your roster. As far as one artist is using this service and other artists is using that service that's just a part of my work and I'm going around and I'm trying to integrate with as many as I can so we can cover the basis for everybody. If they're using ingrews is doing their distribution or tune cores doing it or whoever. So are you saying that through that one feed right there I can get to each artist account and set it up as to their specifics? Sure. Yeah. You would have your own URL and when you went to it your artist roster would appear. You'd just be logged in and then once you're in the system up there where it says the black lilies in the corner like you could just tap that and your roster would drop down and you'd tap an artist and go into their account. After this I'd love to hear what business managers are digging this because I'm always looking for business managers that understand technology and aren't threatened by it and are open to it. I am too. Thank you so much. We should talk about that. Thank you guys. To pick up next up next is Cash Music. Hi. I am Jesse Von Doon from Cash Music along with Maggie Vale. I'm the co-executive director. We're a small nonprofit organization and we work directly with artists to build open source and free tools for them to use in distributing, selling, promoting their music. Pardon me. I have a monitor. I don't want to break it. So basically the kinds of tools we built have been things like direct download sales, email collection, some intelligence around those areas, things, pretty much any workflow we could get our hands on, streaming music, secure streams, previews, etc. And it all started with ideas driven by artists. This is Kristen Hirsch. She sits on our board and really the impetus for Cash came out of a conversation that she had with Anita Sparks of L7 about six years ago now. They were having a conversation about CSAs and farm shares and what they wanted to do was put their music out and find a way that would work for them because what was happening in the past wasn't working for them anymore. They started talking and that started going to their managers. The manager started talking and talked to us. We had known each other and started this thing where we didn't really know what we were starting. We didn't know it was open source and we didn't know it was nonprofit. We just knew that we were trying to build for them specifically. It's worked and should actually be pointed out today in conversation with streaming and everything else too that Kristen Hirsch actually has an audience subscription service all her own now that actually basically pays her a salary and lets her record her music and get it to her fans and that's something that works for her and it's an interesting model and what it made us realize is that we needed to speak to artists directly about what they needed and we needed to trust them as smart and innovative people who could figure out what they needed from the situation. We over the course of four or five years worked on over 170 live projects started with scripts. The scripts turned into ideas. Those ideas turned into one project after another project after another project and what happened was we found our platform by working with people directly. One of the core things and Maggie touched on this before is that art is built to scale and it's a very important piece. Every audience is different and every solution is different. So what we realized was that what we needed to do is find a baseline of tools that would essentially guarantee artists certain access to functionality no matter what their scale, what their size and what business constraints were out there who they were working with, partner was we wanted to find a way to do it that was cooperative that could actually work while always guaranteeing the artist had access to their data and to their services. So what we built was a platform that could be used both by artists and by developers. We used the same language for developers as for artists in an attempt to actually bring them together. The platform here this is a look at our admin back end. This shows you the sort of the split the assets, the people, the commerce calendar and then what we're calling elements of the workflow. I think App Store for a musician's website. Things that can be highly customized and made to be as flexible as possible with artists working on their own accounts. So things like adding an album can use right now it uses Amazon's S3 with your own account. It can use we're building features for Dropbox, for Google Drive, for any kind of storage you might have no problem doing commerce stuff. It'll work with PayPal right now again on accounts and can work with Stripe, other payment processors. That entire thing is abstracted by the platform. It can also be used by developers to build new solutions and completely new things just as a programming interface. Running out of time is going to go fast. These are the core things we've been shipping with. Things like digital purchase, download codes, sign in type things for fan clubs, etc. And really the way that we've tackled this is to deliver a platform that can be used in multiple ways. So we have not launched our hosted thing yet. We're actually in a process of putting it up and actually next week our artist members get to start playing with hosted stuff for the first time. We've been shipping this as an installable download much like a WordPress type thing. You can download it, install it easily. It installs all on screen like a website. Very simple process. We can also we're doing it so that there's it's completely compatible with a thing called Cloud Foundry which is a sort of standardized hosting component so people can launch their own hosted version very easily. And obviously we have a free hosted solution coming as well so you can tow into the water however you like with a hosted account playing around on your own server or if you're a management company for example just installing our hosted version all yourself. The end result though is that things like this happen where if you want to do a purchase you put it in the system you can put it out as an HTML5 widget. It could be a WordPress plugin and it can work directly on your site using a simple single line of PHP. So that's how things have all been built and developed. A couple examples of things we've built in the past. I'm out of time so I'm cheating. Oops. And then I broke that. All right. I think the point in the end and I'll wrap it up and I know over time by a minute but I think the point in the end was really trying to involve artists in this actual process itself by working with them directly is an important thing to us. You know, you heard Tim Westerman today talk about how his business is barely keeping its chin above water and I think that's an important point for us to all realize that the technology sector is in a hard place but artists have their head so far under water now they're learning how to breathe under water and swim and I think that we should actually trust their guidance in building these platforms and listen to them for what they need but I will shut up and listen to questions. Thank you. Who's first? So how does this integrate with my Facebook, SoundCloud, Twitter website, all of it? Yep. Basically the way we do it, we have two different ways of integrating but we've abstracted everything out so you can either go and if you're feeling fancy you could set up your own Twitter Twitter app and plug in the keys and the secrets and stuff and that will use things like tweet for download for example is one of the things we built a long time ago and that we're integrating with the platform on the admin side too you could also do it with an OAuth type of account so if you're hosted you just click a button log in and you're off and running and how do y'all make money? We're a nonprofit so one of the things that we've done in the past we've done sponsorships to date we've done a Kickstarter that raised about $60,000 from 13 or 1400 people and we have we have various sponsorships and relationships with different companies Mozilla and Google have helped us out going forward we are working on a membership organization so we have 250 artists members to date that's a fully free thing and we'll always have free members but we're also looking at a value add membership tier so that will be a sort of ongoing fundraiser I have a question I'll fill in a few a little bit that's alright so does your platform allow you to do like gating, tweet gating email exchange for media and then populate the CRM application of my choice or is CRM a part of your platform as well? We're working on it now on a sort of more micro level CRM it's not the sort of sales force type thing where it's insanely robust because that's I think I'd probably kill myself if I had to build that but yeah we work on some lightweight features like that but the data portability is actually a major issue right now we've been talking to a few people about data export formats as well of all the data including commercial transaction data and history and everything one of the things we believe at our core is that in order to be able to click a button export their entire history and have it move from service to service so all that data can go and can export Actually as part of the integration I'm curious about integrating with not just CRM but also as part of CRM for it to be valuable is the ability to work with a good email delivery platform whether it's fanbridge or exact target We've been working with MailChimp a lot We don't for the most part what we've been doing now because we are so we are small I mean it's a two person organization so we've been what we've been doing is we've been building abstractions so what we've done for MailChimp we didn't write specifically to MailChimp we wrote an internal flow that could be used by anyone that has an API exposed so we've then taken MailChimp's API and opened it up and made it work with that so that's the same thing we can basically write drivers for any third party API and have them slot into commerce or into managing people or both so that's how we've attacked it How does someone become a member? Right now just ask Part of the reason we haven't opened up to the public yet is just because we're about to do testing on our hosted stuff and once we go into that testing process I think we're going to open the membership up we just needed to limit the amount of feedback we get because one developer two people will eyes on it and then a team of volunteers it's going to be really hard for us if we get more than those 250 people in our years so we have 250 people that we trust who span genres who span ages who span you know everything we get to span basically and that's so we trust that we have the right people and yeah anybody who wants to be a member who wants to talk to us more about seeing things by all means just email us or get in touch you're welcome to play with things So if someone knows nothing about HTML like what would you recommend for that like how would you recommend they dig into this Well as right now we're trying to make it as easy as possible to have embeds happen so we're thinking of it a lot like a YouTube movie we have an HTML5 embed pretty much exactly like that now where we just went into testing about two weeks ago, three weeks ago with that sort of wider publicly it's actually being used by bands like Viva Voce just launched a new website, a new record using our HTML5 widgets and basically just like you grab a link paste it into whatever system you're using if it's Tumblr or something custom throw it on the page and hit save and it displays the entire workflow spits it all out and that's actually a big a big driver of the entire platform is this idea of taking the entire workflow and making that workflow go from place to place so if that's I'm a developer and I'm using PHP you have a PHP way to do it you want to copy and paste an HTML5 widget or a WordPress plugin just again WordPress plugin is one line of code you drop it anywhere in WordPress and it starts to work I am biased of course but I just love you as a designer and I just the platform is so it just appears so simple you know for the artists and their team and also for the fans so I really appreciate that as a manager and just real quickly I don't know how much you can get into this but with a band like the Lumineers that have a hit right now at radio are you guys seeing and I can ask Kristen this too but are you guys seeing spikes in the direct-to-fan example that you gave or is it mostly the hardcore fans? That was actually a very unfortunate example I took the screen shot thinking they were a relative unknown several months ago we actually did a pre-release stream for the Lumineers we didn't do anything direct-to-fan so we serviced outlets and mostly media folks so that's one of the components that we've built over the years is a pre-press or very early press stages streams of records and things like that that were secure that couldn't leak but that we wanted to have some flexibility with and some things like that so that'd be a fun experiment to try so in your presentation if I'm looking at the platform it's not totally DIY it's something that you would have to have your coding tab or your internet staff deal with that we're programmers potentially not necessarily we do have a hosted solution coming we're in testing that next week and that one is literally just an email address get a password and you're good and yeah from there you can just copy and paste everything like you would with a youtube video like I said and you said your future plans to generate revenue involve premium services what price tiers are you looking at for premium services? not premium services that way so much as a non-profit with members we were actually looking to do we've been talking to various companies and organizations about like let's just say rental card discounts thinking about it more like a triple A type of thing so we have members who could actually have services going across different worlds so like pretty much things that different fees and different services getting breaks across the industry for our members and that's the kind of thing we'd like to do because we're doing more in the sort of outreach education with our members right now as well so we will not be charging artists directly for services the only thing we would charge for would be something like if we were if we built a big content delivery network type thing that cost us money we'd pass it on to artists but at cost so with that content delivery option involved something like you make the capability to have discounts for downloads and you say you take fundings with PayPal for that I mean that would you I mean like file hosting so if we had file hosting and cost us money we would say you used 87 cents of our stuff this week you owe us 87 cents we're not charging artists for any of the services so was that just at this time you're not charging artists no we are not we'll never charge for our services for artists absolutely not well how can I ensure that in 10 years you won't go under that's the beauty of open source you see is that everything we're doing is out in the public you can download the source code you can build your own business off of it that's how to be available to me in 10 years it will always be available to you and it also cannot be bought and cannot be closed that's the whole that's the whole point with both non-profit and open source it's a bit of a guarantee that that stuff cannot be taken over Sony can't come along and buy the company there's no ownership in the company I don't profit I can't sell it I can't pull $20 million out of it this year and there's nothing like that I could possibly do so yeah this is very firmly held belief that artists need access to this they need to be able to guarantee access to this and it has to be something that is an open future on an open web or artists are just going to keep finding the next piece of lock-in and we're trying to avoid that so alright great thanks so much I appreciate you okay our next five minute presentation and questions will be with a huge fan oh that's the narrative okay let's see how we do this hey everybody nice to see you and I'm this goes left and far am I getting it right oh someone else is driving as well my name is Chris McDonald I'm the CEO and founder I'm a huge fan it's a marketplace where performers and entertainers sell offer in-person experiences to the biggest fans so we make it possible to meet your hero like these three did they didn't believe they got the chance to hang out after a show with Warner Theopolis who's a Warner artist or that the family believe it or not it was a father and a son today training with world champion heavyweight Seth Mitchell or the dad and son who gushed over dinner with mostly bears lead singer and and got to hang out with him as a as a special guest so basically fans are telling us their dreams because you can also request them as much as purchase them and try to do whatever we can to make them come true so let's baseline the new normal in the music industry I don't need to explain much to you guys except to say that there's big pain points and the first two there's not enough of and frankly they have a big impact on the third so we focus on the first two and we do that on tour over 170,000 performers and entertainers make over half their income touring live and performing life and there's over 62 million people in the US who self-identify as super fans or as extremely interested in their heroes so we're about connecting them up and what we've also noticed is that let's take a look at this is that basically excuse me that when it comes to promoting a specific live event there's not a whole lot there that really makes a difference and there's this cognitive dissonance between what performers and venues we see are offering and what fans really die hard fans are hoping and what care about so for example, who's a fan of a tour right we kept on finding these websites talking about the tour and people care about what they are going to see that night they're excited they're going to bring their friends they're going to talk about it why are these websites not geared for that specific night well it's hard and it's not a good use of funds right everybody's focusing on outcome but it's really hard and expensive to create these pop-up communities that dissipate as quickly as they form and how performers make money or make money for their cause and make their fans deliriously happy so let me show you how we do that so entertainers use our free tour dashboard there's a pre-populated landing page one for each show so it includes things that fans respond to like countdowns coming up or curated social feeds or testimonials managing these pages are automatic we pull data from information so obviously you don't have to so here's another example lots of us are huge fans of Aziz so let's go through the process inside of each is a huge fan experience after-party in this case so Frank is a big fan of Aziz he can't believe the chance that he gets to hang out with him so he goes and lo and behold look there's an Aziz opportunity he clicks in he sees there's two left he makes the purchase on this case he signs up with Facebook and within a minute he has made that purchase and he is going to a party with his hero and Aziz is making money and we take a 12% transaction fee so at the party this is one very happy superfan we believe this is the future of fan entertainment where performers are making more money on tour they're doing it within their own schedules and and there's a real opportunity for these brand advocates to really talk about the experience because you know they're going to be sharing it so we got a good team together to kind of help us steer and get our next deals going and what we're really about is creating deliriously happy moments in people's lives so we're currently in the process of raising some funds we have big plans 500,000 experiences in 36 months so our next round is geared towards getting 2,500 of those experiences and we believe we're in a great position to do it we've got five free opportunities with me to talk over 100 free experiences for a pro account that I'd be happy to discuss with the right partners alright, thank you very much alright, great, thank you so Chris, what if I don't want to charge my fan $175 I love my fans what if I say I want it to be free for them the platform is free to use you don't have to have the huge fan experience and you can offer it for free so I just log in and create it myself right now we're concierging the system meaning we're just adminning and learning and getting our feet wet and we launched in April new companies abound and the next step is once we really refine that workflow then we're going to open up so one of the reasons you probably can, you know, we're going to artist to artist and just asking them the sorts of questions and what we've realized is that you know, that's still a great opportunity for use, free is fine so at some point in the future I could hit you up and have an idea for it and you'd put it on a huge fan and it could be free for the fans and even if you're getting 12% of zero and you're still willing to do that yeah, no, we're willing to, you know, offer it up and allow people to use it you know it's going to still it'll still be a huge fan experience I am going to take you up on that awesome point in the future I'm happy, I'm going to clap so no doubt this is a great revenue stream for artists with their hardcore fans we do things like this pretty frequently we also do them on our own so I don't necessarily need to cut someone in what is very appealing to me though is how you're asking fans what they want so I really liked how you flipped that question around to come up with things that the artists or I haven't thought of so that's just going to be extremely appealing to managers, I mean, there's so many great tools and things like that but if you can come to us as managers and say this fan wants to do this this special thing with Brenda Benson that you haven't thought of I'm going to be all over that but if it's just a dinner a sound check, things like that we're totally already doing it so I'd love that I'd love to get my artists in your system and see what people are interested in and I definitely applaud you for working with comedians my business partner would be thrilled about that there's countless music conferences but there are, you know comedy doesn't get talked about as much so I'm glad that's working for you with Aziz and you know I'd love to be proved wrong on doing it myself and to try something with the athlete that we work with well thanks, we've really probably the biggest thing that people react kindly and excited about are the demand side stuff and we've seen lots of companies really try to carve that out and we've seen a lot of pivoting and reiteration it always boils down to who's in the position of asking to have an artist ask the question even if it's not on a huge fan it's just a really great process to say hey, I'm coming to New York what should I do? and then the outliers will be on a date but maybe we will go up in the Empire State Building together, who knows? I have a question to follow up on what Emily was saying with the artists that we work that I work with, we work with really big artists like Lil Wayne and Nicki Minaj as a part of the touring that we do they have these things we have these things built in we'll hold back a portion of the tickets and we'll sell them to fans for a lift the price is $100 and we'll sell tickets for $350 or $400 but for that additional margin they get this experience this VIP experience but it becomes easy for us to work with for instance Ticketmaster because of the marketing power that we have to promote those kinds of things so how would you do that could you do things where you bundle ticket prices in do you work with Ticketmaster how would you see that relationship work currently we don't work with Ticketmaster we're consciously looking for opportunities where we're not necessarily going head to head with an entrenched incumbent company our current average of an experience price isn't $10,000 in experience it's slightly over $500 we believe we can get that edge that up to say $1,000 there's a lot of $500 experiences that's not to say that we wouldn't love to work with your artists but at this point we believe that the power is going to come from the use the venues are then going to come to us because they're going to realize oh gosh look at what's going on nearby at the coffee shop beside where we are and we are fully prepared to give complete credit and relationships to those venues and then through that we're going to be marketing out Ticket really the reality is when someone cares about the event their most highest focus time is at the point of purchase so we are absolutely focusing on getting in on that but now not a deal with Ticketmaster just yet so you're telling me then that your revenue stream is coming from the 12% of whatever it is that the price is for the event is that correct that is correct these are ticketed events we have a billing system already built and in place and we are developing a contest model is there a bottom into the bidding system like we say we don't know there's you could do a no reserve we recommend a cap so you can kind of manage where you want ahead right so it's really up to you just like with any other bidding system so basically if everybody decided that they didn't want to charge for any of the services you would never see the 12% you go out of business that way well there's a lot of very very successful freemium model businesses out there and we don't believe that people will we're going to try to provide as much ease as possible at the end of the day it's a time and resource issue you know artists and their managements are obviously rightfully complaining that they don't have enough time in the day to get from point A to point B where companies like artists growth and band camp come in has really helped to reduce that time level when they're extending all of their assets out and cash music is really taking a piece out of that as well so that's great but at the end of the day you know do you want to spend three or four hours preparing something and unless it's going to a cause which is also very laudable in a great way to do it there's often some de minimis amount of transaction I have one concern and my one concern is this is Brian is well aware when you have a fan like Nicki Minaj she has let's say some probably overzealous fans sometimes and if there's a bidding system and that overzealous fan is willing to bid higher than everybody else for some artists that might pose a security risk because as a manager you need to control who has access to your artists at one time it's a realistic problem and when we get to the level where security becomes an issue we address it head on and it becomes a part of the roll up of the experience I would recommend trying to get into bed with promoters sooner rather than later because if you're doing any sort of performance album or performance element at the coffee shop next door they're going to yell at me about radius clauses and things like that so there is absolutely added value to what you're doing so you might want to start with you know I don't know where you're based but some local venues are smaller promoters and start bringing bigger promoters examples because otherwise they're just going to get pissed off at both of us that's a great point thank you great thanks so much alright for our last presentation Songkick I'm in great company up here thank you guys so my name is Brooke and I am the artist ambassador at Live Music website Songkick I'm also a working musician so I very much know the type of the struggling artist maybe a little too well at sometimes so we started Songkick with one mission and that was to make it easier for fans to find out about concerts for their favorite artists and we are a team of massive Live Music nerds ourselves so we really just wanted more people to have that experience so fast forward 5 years and Songkick is now the second largest concert website after Ticketmaster we have 7 million monthly visitors and we have the largest database of fan demand in the world so that's fans telling us where they are and who they want to see live so we spent a lot of time trying to understand fans but fans are really only half the equation so in the last year we've spent a lot of time working on artist tools to help make the lives of artists easier one is a no brainer something you guys can kind of use right away the other one is a bit more of an experiment but something that we're very excited about so the first one is called tour box and it's tour date management tools for artists so it's that enter once published across all of your websites thing that we've seen and even better than that we also push all of those tour dates to all of our partners like YouTube, Spotify, Foursquare, Hype Machine, Countless Others so kind of getting those tour dates in front of the fans that are watching or listening but might not necessarily go out and seek out tour dates that's what some of them look like the second artist tool is called detour and it came about because as fans, live music fans we really understand what it's like to wait and wait for your favorite band to come to town only to have them skip you over and traditionally there's really been no way for fans to directly influence that ah yes demand it so this is a map of my band's last European tour that we did oops I accidentally pressed the button so I posted this map right after the tour and immediately got fans posting places they want us to come next time so as an artist from the other side I also know what it's like to constantly have your Facebook fans be posting places for you to come bemoaning the fact that you never tour there but even more frustrating than that is the fact that it's usually logistically and financially impossible to do so because there's a lot of risk involved in touring so Songkick in the last year have been working on a fan funded touring platform called detour and it's really based off of that premise that your true fans will do more than just post a comment on Facebook they will actually pledge money up front to bring you to their town so here's an example Hotship wanted to do a show in kind of a new market for them in the UK so we put on a detour with three potential dates and kind of off the beaten path cities and this is what happened there is a small town in southeastern UK called Folkestone went completely viral and sold out in a couple of hours one fan personally emailed 2,000 of his friends to try and get them to pledge and oh you can see where the line kind of slumps momentarily up there that's when the people of Folkestone finally went to sleep for the night so currently we are working on what will be the largest crowd funded tour ever and that is really exciting because it's going to be Andrew Bird in six cities and it's his first time in Latin America so from an artist perspective I think there's a lot of really exciting things about detour you might be able to tour in new markets make more money play to more people just really take some of that risk out of touring but I think for us the most exciting thing that we've seen so far is the actual feel of the shows because they have this real electricity to them that normal shows really don't have and I think that's because the fan feels ownership over the show and they really made it happen and I think because of that they feel that much more connected to the artist so I think as Songkick moves forward on artist tools this is really what we want to focus on like we want artists to play more shows and better shows and to spend less time actually updating those shows online and more time kind of forging those deep connections with their true fans so this is where you can find out more information please come talk to me I'll give you a business card and we'd love to hear your thoughts on it great thank you just a couple quick quick comments so one slight issue that I have with Songkick as an artist is that whatever algorithm that you use to aggregate data from shows that come up as Will Eastman or Volta Bureau or whatever name I'm performing under at that night if there is for example an early show and a late show it will aggregate all of those artists so for example we recently did a and this is just a bit of a pet peeve that I have both as an artist and a venue owner we recently did an early show with Santa Tien at U Street Music Hall there was a later show with Ponte de Prince and another artist but on Songkick it had them all together on one show so then we as a venue and me as an artist get hit up by people saying like that's a really weird bill why are all these artists together and I'm saying that doesn't exist in reality it's actually two separate shows but Songkick has aggregated them and I have no way of going on to your site and changing it and we've tried to in the past sort of hit up people but it takes some time for it to get changed but another really quick thing that I would mention is that as an artist I feel a bit of fatigue in terms of like different services like and once you get to a certain stage I don't know if it's just once you get older or once you get to so many social media sites I actually want fewer I don't want more so one thing that would really help me and benefit me in terms of Songkick is if you had really tighter integration with Facebook and SoundCloud which are two of my primaries and I kind of don't want to have to go to a second site to update dates I'd just rather be able to do it all yeah absolutely okay I'm going to try and remember all your points so I can address them all so on the data side obviously that's an issue that we struggle with all the time we aggregate from about 150 different sources so it's always kind of a tradeoff because an algorithm that's matching you know a very complicated data set it's either you get duplicates or you combine things that you don't want combined so that's why we launched Tourbox is kind of you can think of it as a like a dashboard for Songkick so you can go in there and control those shows separate them out and yeah I mean data concerns like that are always something that we're thinking about I'm sorry so one of the issues that I have is making sure that with respect to social media sites that there's communication between the real person you know so that we you know like with Twitter they got the verified accounts and you know how what are you guys doing to make sure that you're actually getting information from Will if he's going to make a change to the date how do you know it's not you know me pretending to be Will yeah absolutely we have tons of issues with imposter accounts yeah of course especially at that level when you sign into Tourbox with your Songkick account you basically with your user account can manage multiple artist pages on Songkick and Tourbox so if it's like Nicki Minaj or something like that like you have to request access and we kind of work with you to figure out that you are who you say you are but to go back to your point about artist fatigue I am a touring musician myself I absolutely know what that feels like and I think that's why Songkick have really kind of moved away from making your making another profile for you to update like we don't allow you to put bios and stuff like that you know because we really just want to feed into all of your other sites and make your life easier and I think as long as we're providing value in that in that way then that's where we want to be and we do have a Facebook app we have an exclusive integration with SoundCloud so you literally put in your artist URL from Songkick and it just pulls automatically yeah my team loves Tourbox so yeah they they are psyched on it detour makes me want to cry tears of joy I have thought of this idea and I approached multiple online ticketing platforms as well as crowdfunding companies and it didn't fit into what they built already so it's so brilliant I have all the information on our artists on you know through Google analytics and things like that and I just haven't had I'm so into the idea of pre-selling tickets especially you know the hot ship example is great but there's times where I've launched a new artist and I have all this promo and I have all these things going on and I'm so sick of booking shows and maybe even spending money on promo and hoping that people show up and I've wanted to do this so I have a new band that I want to try this with and even at the mid level you know mid-sized touring level it's really valuable because it's expensive to tour and we only want to go to places where you know we're drawing so again I have all this information way too many booking agents don't care and a lot of platforms I talk to just it didn't fit so I I'm really really pumped to talk to you about that yeah one one example that really fits with that is the actual very first detour that we did was this guy from San Francisco called Tyco and he had never been to Europe before and we brought him to London for his first European show and that was the perfect case study because he had never been there so promoters weren't willing to take a risk so he literally had no other way to get there but we knew because we have such a massive database of live fan demand that he had 500 fans in London that wanted to see him play and it was amazing show awesome yeah I never would have thought of contacting you guys but tell Ian he needs to email me more okay so when you do the the um suggested performance locations and when you know 500 people say they want to be in Zimbabwe and want to see that my artists perform um there's a couple of questions that I have in regard to just that that scenario first of all you said that they could financially invest in it or to that how does that work and what happens to that money the dispensation how does that get out there because you know you I could email five thousand of my closest Facebook friends and say hey go you know vote for this or whatever but when time for the artists to come perform nobody can find them anywhere so I mean you know everybody nobody has a credit card information nobody has anything so how does that that work itself it's kind of a competition between cities so we actually pre-authorized the credit card of the fans so like for Andrew Bird we put on I think it was 12 to 15 cities in in Latin America um and then the top six that reach the threshold of tickets first will win the show basically so that's how that kind of money component works um at the moment it's still like I said it's an experiment and it's still very curated by us so like we're working very very hands-on with like promoters on the ground in these locations um with the management company their booking agent the artists themselves all those people really need to be involved because we're trying to figure out how this works best and and I think in the future the our challenges to figure out how to how to kind of scale this a bit better so that more artists like it can be more of a self-serve platform and more artists can kind of take advantage of of using this my my second question is is there any aid in location of a specific venue that might fit based upon the proposed amount of people who want to come uh do you give any guidance in that or is that totally for the booking agents and things of that nature yeah right now we're very much working with promoters that are on the ground in in Latin America for Andrew Byrd stuff like that so it's it's um yeah it when it scales it it that might not be as uh as easy to do but it's I think there will always be that kind of local component because you need someone with local knowledge like they know their market there I know you guys are a UK based company you just mentioned Latin America are you truly global like can we do stuff in Brazil that's that's where I need it yeah absolutely everybody else is in London I'm based in Portland Oregon um holding down the fort in the US but yeah I mean I think that's one of the really exciting things about detour is like taking artists to new markets because you know with all this like online grouping of fans everywhere it's it's been really hard to to kind of like take advantage of that as um a music industry all right great well thank you so much and thanks to all of the presenters and uh reaction panelists