Songkick Lets Fans Build Andrew Bird's South American Tour For Him

Culture

from the the-world-is-changing dept

Over the last few weeks, we’ve been talking about Songkick’s new “Detour” feature, which artists are using to set up shows in “off the beaten track” places, where they’d be unlikely to tour normally, but via Songkick, they discover there are enough fans to make it worthwhile. Considering how often we hear from musicians that touring is such a crap shoot on whether or not you’ll make money, it’s great to see more tools spring up to help take away that risk. There are a few interesting side effects of all of this. First, beyond just taking some of the risk out of touring, it’s also helping artists find different fans they can reach via touring. That doesn’t mean they drop existing places, but that they can expand their opportunities. But the second, and perhaps more interesting aspect, is the social one — in which fans have been using Detour to bring in more fans. That’s because one of the ways that Detour can be used is to effectively have a competition, in which cities compete to see which one has more fans willing to crowdfund an appearance by an act they love.

The latest to jump into the Detour pool is a pretty big name artist: Andrew Bird was unsure if it would make sense for him to do a South American tour, but is now using Detour to make sure it’s financially viable — and to figure out what cities he should visit on the tour.

“I’ve been wanting to go to these countries for years because I’m a fan of their rich musical traditions. Songkick Detour seems like a brilliant idea as it gives me a sense of connection to the people before I go there.”

There’s a competitive element to this. There are twelve cities (in nine countries) competing (the twelve were picked by going through Songkick’s data, to see where Bird had lots of fans — sometimes in surprising places) for six open slots for shows in February of next year. The setup is basically that the first six shows that have fans crowdfund 250 tickets get the open slots for the gigs. It will be interesting to see if fans in the different cities rally to encourage fans to buy in to get the concert.

These efforts remain very experimental, so who knows how well they’ll succeed long term, but I love the fact that we’re still seeing unique innovations in different aspects of the music business. Obviously, for many artists, touring has become a bigger part of their revenue stream lately — but it’s also one part of the business that many artists complain has extremely high costs and risks. The system has been inefficient for years, allowing the business to bleed musicians. So it’s encouraging to see more attempts to improve the efficiency of the concert business — and doing so in a way that gets more fans connected to bands, and allows acts to find “out of the way” places to play live, while minimizing the risk of doing so.

Filed Under: andrew bird, crowdfunding, detour, tours
Companies: songkick