Techdirt. Stories about "gigfunders" Easily digestible tech news... http://www.techdirt.com/ en-us Techdirt. Stories about "gigfunders"http://www.techdirt.com/images/td-88x31.gifhttp://www.techdirt.com/ Tue, 23 Oct 2012 19:57:48 PDT And... Jonathan Coulton Crowdsourcing A Piece Of His Next Tour As Well Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/blog/casestudies/articles/20121023/15044820803/jonathan-coulton-crowdsourcing-piece-his-next-tour-as-well.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/blog/casestudies/articles/20121023/15044820803/jonathan-coulton-crowdsourcing-piece-his-next-tour-as-well.shtml crowdsourcing his new South American tour via Songkick, someone points out that Jonathan Coulton (who has experimented with crowdsourcing shows in the past using Eventful), just announced a similar effort via a new ticketing site called BringTheGig. BringTheGig has a slightly different feature set, which is also interesting. The first group of people to pledge to bring a concert to the area (providing enough support to make the show happen) can actually then get their money back if the show itself turns out to be really big. So, this gives incentives for fans to sign up early and to tell all their friends about it.
Here’s how it works. There are 40 funder slots available – basically 40 tickets that go on sale in advance of the rest of them. After two weeks (or sooner), these slots will theoretically be filled, and the rest of the tickets will go on sale. If you are one of these first 40 people, you get your money back if we get more than 160 people to come to the show.

It’s a pretty cool idea I think: get a core of fans to cover what you need to make the show happen, and then incentivize those to spread the word
There are other similar sites, like GigFunder, and Eventful's "Demand It!" feature is still around as well. Songkick's Detour platform also has similar incentives, but through a very different mechanism. Given all this activity, I'm hopeful that we'll start seeing more innovative ways to make live shows more efficient and effective, while also creating new ways for artists to connect with fans and to help fans spread the word about their favorite artists. It seems like a real opportunity that is only just now being explored more deeply.

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