Crowdsourcing Concerts — the Future of Live Music? 58
New submitter roryed writes "Performer Jonathan Coulton, famous among some geeks for 'Code Monkey' and writing Portal's 'Still Alive' wrote on his blog, 'Salt Lake City, the last ticket link for the Nov/Dec tour, has finally gone up. The reason for the delay was that we were working on the details of this experimental ticketing thing called Bring the Gig.' Bring the Gig is a new form of crowdsourcing, much like a Kickstarter for concerts. The idea is to have fans put up the money to bring bands to their city by buying premium tickets. If the goal is met and the band is booked, general box office tickets are sold. If the show sells enough at the box office, or sells out, the original premium ticket holders get a full refund and keep their ticket, effectively seeing the show they helped bring for free. Coulton also writes, 'Could be a disaster! Exciting! Honestly I have no idea if this is going to work, but as you know, I am a scientist. I like to watch what happens.'"
This has worked well in Brazil. (Score:5, Interesting)
This model has worked REMARKABLY well in Rio de Janeiro. It's called Queremos! [queremos.com.br], and has managed to bring several bands that wouldn't come to the city otherwise. Their pricing model is precisely as explained in the summary, and so far all the gigs were completely sold and the first-comers received their money back. There is, however, some details to their practice that one has to note before trying this elsewhere:
1) Queremos allows other companies to buy up to 50% (IIRC) of those special tickets, so that they may distribute those tickets as part of promotions or similar.
2) Queremos allows fans to buy more than one special ticket but, seeing as that ticket is not a physical ticket, but rather a name on a list, transfering a ticket to someone is something you have to request to the promoters. This looks burdensome, but also protects the promoters from smart people trying to resell those special tickets at a profit.
3) The fact that the special-ticket holders are interested in a full house gig (because of the money coming back to them), they are going to help spreading the word of the gig a lot. You HAVE to capitalize on this - specially in the age of social media.