[Interview] Nick Klimchuk, CEO of Encore

By Carolyn Heneghan

“Notice the sea of screens at concerts? Live music events are the number one usage occasion of smartphones, and yet there is no go-to concert app,” said Encore CEO Nicholas Klimchuk in a recent press release. “We’re trying to change that with Encore.”

You probably noticed it at the last live show you went to—smartphones have replaced lighters in the concert space, and whether you use them or hate them, the trend is here to stay. But the concert-centered app Encore, backed by Next 36, aims to revolutionize the live concert experience for those both able and unable to attend. And what’s the best way to encapsulate memories and share the experience with those who couldn’t be there? Photos, videos, set lists—you name it, Encore has it.

Simple and fun to use, Encore connects users with not only the concerts they’re waiting to see, like most other concert apps, but it also puts an emphasis on shows of the past—shows, in fact, that date as far back as the 1960s. The app takes an innovative approach to tapping into the passions of a concertgoer by integrating photos and videos from social media and concert and set list information from other dedicated services and more.

To share more about the app, its capabilities, and its bright future, Klimchuk took the time to talk to SoundCtrl about all that Encore has to offer.

SoundCtrl: How did you come up with the idea for Encore? Was there a specific moment in time where the concept just clicked?

Nicholas Klimchuk: Our cofounder [Michael Warshafsky] goes to lots of concerts, and he realized that almost everyone was on their phones taking photos and videos, and he also was unsatisfied with some of the other concert apps that were out there. He thought that he could design something better, and what better way of building a successful concert app than around consumer behavior that everyone’s exhibiting, which is on their phone? So we leverage that and give them a better experience to help them find upcoming events.

How does Encore create these concert time capsules?

We go through a database of Last.fm. We know when and where shows were, so we bring in geo-tagged photos, any Flickr photos that have a number of tags related to the event, and YouTube videos, which are typically well-documented. In the future, we’re going to be bringing in photos and videos from Instagram video, Vine, and Twitter.

How does the app determine which are the best photos and videos to include in a time capsule?

As of now, we don’t do any filtering, but in an upcoming version of Encore, we’re going to let users favorite photos kind of like they do on Instagram. Right now, users just have a profile where they can see the shows they’ve been to, but in a future version, they’ll be able to see which of their friends are on Encore, what shows they’ve been to, their favorited photos as well as favorite artists.

Right now, the app just brings in a lot of data, and it can be overwhelming — there are a lot of selfies that people might not care for. But in the future, you’ll be able to see just your friends’ photos, your photos from the event, and the top-rated photos and videos will be at the top of the time capsule. And in the future we’ve also thought about letting people customize their time capsule so they can easily remove things that they don’t want—it can just be their experience.

Where do you source information for the hundreds of thousands of shows in the future included on the app?

We partner with Last.fm. They have quite an extensive concert database, so the images, the lineup, the location of the show, the start time, everything comes from that database, and then users add on things like news, or you can invite your friends, grab tickets and have the ability to type in your friends to see who’s coming.

How do you think Encore will change the concert experience?

There’s a lot of debate about phones at concerts. On one hand, Encore reduces the need for you to be taking all those photos and videos. Lots of times people take photos and videos at concerts to prove that they were there, for the vanity of sharing on social media to make their friends jealous, or because of nostalgia and wanting to be able to hold on to this lifetime experience.

So what Encore will let people do is, say you’re at the back of the concert, and you take a really dark, blurry photo, you’d prefer to just trade up to the photo that someone took in front of the stage, and that has equal impact. It’s interesting because I can show you photos from Lady Gaga’s concerts from her last tour, and trying to tell you which concert it’s from, you’d think it was your concert because they all look the same. But people subscribe a much higher value knowing that that photo was taken at the concert they went to two years ago, even though the photos can look almost alike.

So in the short term, we’re just trying to make a better concert app so that people can experience live music more and hold on to their memories. But in the long term, whoever wins this race to build the leading concert event app will be able to do a lot more for before, during and after shows. We’re just going to be starting early with the data that people provide on the shows they went to and the people they went with, which is very valuable to promoters, and then slowly move from there adding more functionality.

What kind of feedback have you gotten so far from Encore users?

So over time, people who have used the beta version, the original version of Encore just did photos and videos so there was a lot of demand for, “I want to be able to do something with these upcoming listings,” which we’ve added in the form of buying tickets and sharing with friends. People still want to do more with the photos and videos, which we recognize, so we’re going to be adding the ability to upload your own photos.

Generally the feedback has been that people really like the feel of the app design, they like how we focus on the past as much as on the future. Most concert apps don’t do anything with past shows other than maybe if you bought tickets, they’ll keep them somewhere on the app. We want people to find every single show they went to, even if it’s 1960s Woodstock, which Encore has on the platform.

The way we like to think about this is in the past, people kept ticket stubs as mementos of shows, while people of our generation walk out of concerts and just throw away their ticket stubs, and our promoter partners and board of directors still have their tickets saved from the Beatles concert and the first concerts they went to. So Encore’s trying to create the digital equivalent of that, like the digital ticket stub of these concerts.

What kind of upgrades or evolution do you see for Encore in the future?

The past is a huge differentiator for the Encore app. It’s a way that we expect to keep people engaged. So for example, even if you don’t go to the Arcade Fire show that’s happening in Toronto tonight, you can turn on Encore, and you can see the photos and videos coming in live. Right now, we don’t provide that functionality, but the next day you can see the photos and videos. But it’s a very simple thing where on the Today page, we’re just going to have an indicator blinking, so whether it’s a concert going on locally or a festival that your friends are at, it’s kind of cool to just be able to open the app and see what’s happening with your friends and what’s going on at the concerts on the app.

So that’s one area. And then another thing we’ll be implementing is we’re going to be integrating setlist.fm into all the past shows. It’s owned by LiveNation, and that way, and again with shows going back to the 60s, people can, when they add their shows, see their friends that attended, they’ll see the set list, they’ll see the photos and videos, and again, it’s a nostalgic feel that people have from seeing that information. And also, as soon as the show’s over, we’ll be pushing notifications of what the set list was. So there’s an opener, and you really liked that one song, you’ll have it with you when you leave. So there’s some small adjustments on the past.

As I also mentioned, the profile will be bolstered where we’ll do what most concert apps do right now. We’ll scan your library, we’ll find your favorite artists and then we’ll send you notifications when people go on tour, and then you’ll be able to see which of your friends—it’ll be like a social network for concertgoers—you’ll get to see your friends on Facebook who are also using Encore and see the concerts they’re going to and have been to.

We’re trying to start small and prove that an anchor of past shows is something that can get people onto a platform and then considering upcoming events and then go from there and listen to our users’ feedback.

Check out Encore, recently released from beta onto iTunes, and get started enjoying an encore of all the shows of the past while preparing for shows in the future.