Songkick’s new crowdfunding website for live music events allows fans to put their money where their mouth is and convince their favourite acts to play in their city.
Songkick has announced that its Detour pilot has come out of beta and is now open to the general public, starting in London. Once signed up to the platform, music fans can pledge money to see their favourite acts, in much the same way as platforms like Kickstarter and Pledgie allow consumers to fund the development and manufacture of products.
If enough funds are pledged, Songkick works with promoters to make the event happen. A final ticket price is determined and pledgers are charged for their ticket (if they can still attend and are happy with the price). In a literal take on ‘crowd’ funding, Songkick will use the most engaged contingent of music fans to forge a new and effective way to make money from music, minimising the risk for promoters and artists.
The success of the Detour pilot, which has seen 1,000 music fans registered and ten gigs organised since November, proves that engaging the engaged is a promising model. It’s become common to lament the demise of profitability in recorded music, but to keener observers it’s also apparent that avid music fans are still eagerly investing their cash in other areas of the industry. Artists are wise to the worth of these hardcore fans and social media, most notably Twitter, has had a huge impact on artist-fan interaction in recent years.
Songkick, no doubt aided by data they’ve gathered from their main business of ticket sales and gig alerts, aren’t the first to tap into this profitable pool of musos – Brazil’s Queremos! has been going strong since 2010 and GigFunder launched in the US last year – but their choice of London as a launch city is an interesting move given that the British capital has no shortage of music fans or live music events.
While there is a 10% cut at stake for Songkick, CEO Ian Hogarth sees the impact of Detour as being more fundamental; he says the Detour beta has demonstrated that encouraging fans to support artists they love in this way “is having a profound positive change in the economics of touring, artists’ livelihoods, and the atmosphere at concerts”. In recent years touring has become the bread and butter of many artists’ income, a phenomenon which is easily apparent in dance music. Diplo, for example, reportedly does 300 shows a year.
But what does Detour mean for the sector of highly active music fans the platform relies on? Barriers between fan and artist have rarely been as prohibitive in dance as in rock and pop. Putting creative control in the hands of fans through crowdfunded gigs and shows could build on the existing interchange between fan and artist, while simultaneously creating a reassuring additional source of income for rising producers in the sub-genres and sub-sub-genres of electronic music. But surely the most excitement will come when Detour branches out of the capital – think Suomisaundi hits Orkney…