Originally posted by Bubba:
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Well a lot of people dont go to shows because they dont get to hear new music because radio is shite.
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People who dont go to concerts regularly dont check concert listing regularly, so bands that they would go and see remain unnoticed by them. Your site may help with something like that a little especially if it supplied info of nearby shows, even if they were not in the suppliers home city. But it would probably help to be able to supply a list of bands to you, rather than one at a time.
Another thought, where do you expect this project to go. My fallacy of the excluded middle mind, suggests you will either fade into obscurity, or in a couple of years you will have the next boy band on TRL saying, "if you want to see us live in your city, vote for us on tourvote.com, NOW.....
Very good points, Bubba. And yes, credit (and my thanks) are due to you for starting the topic. What I should have said above was that I introduced the *subtopic* of music fans who don't attend live shows out of curiosity regarding their motivations or lack thereof, and yada yada yada--didn't intend to claim ownership of the whole thread.
Homogenized radio content controlled by Big Music is definitely a factor. There is some good broadcast out there, but it's so marginalized (low power, underpromoted) that it doesn't help much. In the mass market things like Music Choice, Sirius, and XM may at least open up a few ears. The biggest opportunity for new music exposure, though, is the Internet. Among Internet Radio, the artist showcase sites, P2P, and artists' own sites there has been a manyfold increase in the availability of new music to consumers, AND THEY ARE GOING FOR IT. However, it hasn't yet translated into a proportional increase in live show attendance.
One thing that several people have mentioned that I need to clarify is that we are not a destination site. We have two sites for early-stage marketing purposes, but we don't want people to get in the habit of going there to vote or plan their nightlife. We want to provide a new piece of interactive, fan-involving functionality to all kinds of music information sites. That is where we believe the best chance is to intercept both hard-core live music fans and the people who think about seeing live shows but don't currently act on the urge very often. We want *those* sites to prosper, not to pull their traffic away. The more fans they get jazzed up about music--new or old--the better off we are. We'll be content to do the behind-the-scenes work of building the ticket notification lists, feeding the demand information into the value chain, and prodding fans to get out to the shows.
Excellent point about the value of entering band lists. The way we do it right now is to session-cookie the zip code and e-mail info you enter while voting. After you've voted, you can open the vote window again (on the same host site) and the ballot form will be prepopulated with that data--just enter the next band name on your concert wish list. Lather, rinse, repeat, for as many artists as you want to get TourAlerts for (when we start doing the alerts later this fall).
As to where we expect to go, our fate really is in the hands of the fans. We hope participation will beget more participation as music fans talk to each other. Despite our own preferences for more challenging music (all the DID folks are serious music junkies), we are agnostic as to the genres and flavors of music those 80 million fans want to see. If they like boy bands, we want them to GO SEE boy bands, because the excitement of live performances can be habit-forming. Long ago and far away, I used to listen to pure dreck and think the Delta Blues was unbearable. You listen--really listen, as you *must* in a live show--your tastes expand. We'd love it if every band in the world would encourage their fans to go vote for them on a TourVote partner site (*not* TourVote.com), because (a) it would level out the self-promotion effect on the data and (b) it would start many of those fans down the road to becoming more frequent concert-goers.
