by Dave Mainella
There is a premium on connectivity, connecting bands with their fans and establishing channels of information. An artist’s connection with their audience, the shared energy between performer and crowded room – it is the basis of a live music experience. And it is the lifeblood of a musician. He or she lives off that feeling, and in return, it builds and shapes their career.
Bandsintown, a concert ticket aggregator, serves as a catalyst for connecting artists and an audience. Now used by more than 75,000 artists worldwide, Bandsintown addresses the issue of fragmented ticket sales sites and information. By combining a vast collection of information regarding performances with social media devices like Facebook and Twitter, Bandsintown offers a free, personalized, and extensive opportunity to never miss a show again.
Bandsintown was created in 2007 by, “two guys who loved going to shows and hated missing out because they did not learn about them in time,” according to a representative. And it excels at solving that precise problem. “Using one of the most advanced APIs in the world,” the representative continues, “we aggregate event information from a variety of sources including primary ticket companies, booking agents, labels, venues, promotors, and more.” The result is a massive collection of shows and performances, easily displayed at your fingertips.
Once you sign up (or create a login via Facebook), Bandsintown scans your entire music collection – iTunes, Facebook fan pages, Pandora music channels – and presents a vast database of all the bands and musicians you follow and (presumably) like. You then have access to your personalized “Concert Cloud,” showing which of your favorite bands are playing nearby.
Ingeniously, Bandsintown has a built-in artist recommendation engine that offers suggestions based on the artists you track. It is a great way to find new music and see it performed live. It also gives you the option of seeing all concerts being performed in your area.
As mentioned before, Bandsintown integration with Facebook and other social media devices offers a level of engagement to the live music experience. It’s been designed with both the audience and artist in mind.
“All of our products include real Facebook events, and take full advantage of Facebook’s main social channels,” a Bandsintown representative explains. “We’ve built in tools for artists to automatically promote dates to their newsfeed and twitter, and recently released several cool ways for artists to display upcoming and past events on their timeline. Similarly, fans can share events with friends, display their concert history on their own timeline, and post events they are attending to Twitter.”
Bandsintown has created several partnerships to help it succeed. It engages in an extensive network of API partners and developers including eMusic and Shazam. Bandsintown’s 2011 acquisition by Cellfish Media also helped to propel the product into the mobile music service forefront.
Now that the Bandsintown app is available for iPhone and Android, the possibilities for personalized mobile ticketing seem endless. You can receive notifications and alerts when there is new show information, and links to purchase tickets are right at your fingertips. And, as was the intention, there is never an excuse to miss a show.
Dave Mainella is a musician, producer, composer, and writer living in
New York. He graduated from New York University in 2011 with a Jazz
Studies degree. See what he’s up to @DaveMainella.
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