Sharing the Gig Love Interviews, How-Tos,and more

Importance of music business intelligence

Setting out to develop Gigsby, we had lengthy debates around potential value-added products for the industry. One of the areas where we had the lengthiest and the most heated debates was providing business intelligence to agents and promoters so that they can detect and connect with the best talent.

We sure hope that Gigsby will solve the “getting connected” problem once and for all. But when it comes “detecting and effectively managing the talent”, the story is a little bit different. Here are some of the challenges that we believe all serious agencies and promoters – and even artists – are facing:

- You are an agent. Apart from word of mouth or other “accidental” ways of discovery, it is virtually impossible to find great talent before it becomes visible to everyone. ( Who had heard of Deadmau5 before everyone did? ) How do you make sure that you’ll be the first to know?

- If an artist has made it, you can bet that (almost) everyone has heard about it. The chances are, the artist is already being represented by another agency. Goodbye $$! How do you compete with other agencies that are closer to the action?

- You are a promoter and really like this certain DJ. He seems to be popular by all accounts. You want to book him. But does he really have any fans in your geographical area? No one knows. Or as our dear friend Johnny Flawless would have said, it is “f**king guesswork”. And unfortunately, that guesswork can cost you thousands of dollars overnight. How do you make sure your event won’t be a flop?

- You are an agency. You have a sizable roster of artists and you are finding it virtually impossible to keep a close eye on where each one of your artists are headed at and what you can do about it. Are you investing your time in the right people at the right time?

- You are an up-and-coming artist and have just agreed to share 20% of your booking fees with your agency. Your agent also doubles as your publicist/marketer and you have high expectations of him just like of yourself. Is he doing his job well? Is he creating a lot of buzz for you in the social media? How do you know? What is your yardstick, your reference point?

And the answer?

Well, all of these questions we feel are relevant and hope they are resonating with the industry folks as well. While there is no perfect answer and there always has to be some amount of guesswork, we believe that it is possible to make more educated, intelligent guesses backed by data.

And so we found that the “data” was actually out there available and was waiting to be crunched. And crunch we did….Movers and Shakers – our working title- is evolving into that decision making product for the industry that will address these questions. We feel that it will fill an existing information gap and provide substantial competitive edge to those who are smart enough to take advantage of it.

But enough vision plugging for now. I will continue with the mechanics of this product in a follow-on post. Bye now.