How the touring industry will use data in 2021 — even in a pandemic

By: Julie Knibbe

Published: 2020-12-09

This is the fourth installment in a five-part series about how music professionals use data across multiple industry sectors, including A&R, artist development, live events and royalty management.

Navigate to the rest of the series below:

Live performance is an essential outlet for artists to cultivate and connect with their fans. It’s what we all picture when we think of “being an artist” — and for good reason. According to Billboard, touring represented nearly 80% of total revenue earned by the top 10 highest-paid musicians in 2019. Total global revenues for touring were estimated to be around $28 billion last year, outpacing the recorded-music sector by nearly 30%.

Of course, the crisis affecting the live industry in 2020 is devastating and unprecedented. Live Nation’s revenue in Q3 2020 plummeted by 95% year-over-year, and a growing list of artists like Billie Eilish and Nick Cave have already cancelled their 2021 tours entirely. In turn, artists and their teams have had to adapt to these conditions and find new ways to connect with their fan bases online.

However, I still wanted to cover how professionals use data in the live sector as part of this series, planning for 2021 and beyond. Just like in any other area of the music industry, the live sector can use data as a tool to help with planning, mitigating risk and optimizing investments around future concerts and tours.

In this piece I’ll dive into:

Using data to plan and book live, face-to-face events

A. Ticket sales, ticket sales, ticket sales

In a previous piece for Water & Music, Cherie Hu covered how booking agents use (and don’t use) data in their careers, which I highly recommend reading. One of the standout points is that there is no better indicator of future show performance than previous ticket sales and attendance; in Hu’s words, an artist’s touring history is “by far the most crucial kind of data that agents reference in their day-to-day decision-making.”

For bookers who don’t necessarily have access to that information, Pollstar provides artist and venue tour histories for about 60,000 artists (see screenshot above for an example). In February 2020, Pollstar also launched its Data Cloud, which gives subscribers access to the company’s entire tour-routing and box-office history for the last five years, thanks to a partnership with Google Cloud.

This data isn’t cheap: The Pollstar Data Cloud costs $160/month, while its on-demand tour histories cost $25 each for non-subscribers. There’s also a chicken-and-egg situation as emerging artists may not have any touring history to work with, especially if they’re looking to export themselves outside of their home cities or countries. In that case, referring to similar artists’ sales in a given region can give a hint of whether an audience exists there for your own music.

Diana Gremore, Business Intelligence Analyst at Paradigm Talent Agency, advises that if you don’t have touring history, then you should just start creating it. “Once an artist is ready, likely timed with a special release or festival appearance, then they should prioritize playing in venues and cities that historically are known to support emerging artists,” says Gremore.

It sounds circular, but it’s true: There is nothing better to forecast ticket sales than ticket sales themselves. And in a pandemic landscape dominated by livestreaming, it’s easier for artists to take the reins of promotion, pricing and data-gathering for virtual events, which can help build up the leverage for when in-person tours return (more on this later).

Before the show: Understanding fandom and evaluating an artist’s local footprint

Apart from ticket sales, gauging and anticipating demand for shows remains a challenge.

From the fan’s perspective, buying a concert ticket, especially for a show several months in advance, requires a lot more upfront “commitment” than just listening to an artist on a streaming platform. While booking or planning a show and forecasting sales, promoters and agents have to understand the many factors that influence local buying behaviors, and what will make a local fan base willing to go see a particular artist in person.

Business analysts in the live industry rely on many similar signals as label A&Rs during the scouting and evaluation process: Looking for artists who have the ability to retain the attention of their audiences, and who present clear cases for why their audiences want to follow them. They focus on organic follower growth and healthy audience engagement over surface-level consumption numbers alone.

Having listeners in a city doesn’t necessarily translate to local fandom; due to the way playlists work, many of these “listeners” might not even know the artist by name. Demographic data from social media analytics sources is usually more reliable than local streams, as it shows a more direct interest in the artist. One also has to tread carefully and examine information on a case-by-case basis, as it also depends on what artists post on their social accounts (e.g. sometimes music isn’t the primary reason one would follow an artist).

One of the biggest struggles of the live industry is that promoters and booking agents usually don’t have access to the proprietary tools or data that managers or labels have about their artists. Instead, they have to rely on public or third-party data, and/or make their own estimates based on previous experience.

Even within the live sector itself, access to data is imbalanced across equally important job functions. As digital marketer Sammy Andrews wrote for Music Week, while managers and agents “know about tours months in advance of them ever going on sale … promoters are often the last ones in that chain owing, in the most part, to the bidding processes, despite being the folks with the biggest job to do.”

Soundcharts is one of many tools that promoters and agents can use to cross-reference audience data from streaming and social platforms with touring history. The example below shows FKJ’s top cities on Spotify, YouTube and Instagram. Looking closer at FKJ’s Instagram account, he demonstrates an intimate and natural aesthetic, and good fan engagement numbers (an Instagram engagement rate of likes/comments over followers of about 10%). Both combined might make a good case for booking him in intimate settings in these cities.

Apart from social media, Google Trends can be a great tool to evaluate and compare local interest for artists in specific markets, given that over 70% of all tickets purchased for concerts originate with a Google search.

Since Google only provides normalized data, it’s always better to compare artists in their Trends tool instead of focusing on just one. In the example below, I compared two independent French rappers, Ninho and Orelsan. While they are both quite famous (13 million and 9 million cumulative followers across major streaming and social media platforms respectively), the Google Trends geographic breakdown is useful for highlighting which artist attracts more online search activity than the other in a particular city. In our case, Ninho “wins” in the larger cities in France like Paris, Marseille and Lyon, while Orelsan has higher search activity in more rural areas.

Individual data sources should be treated as complementary to each other, rather than as comprehensive and authoritative on their own. The more that various sources converge, the more trustworthy their underlying information is.

Marketing and promotion are also essential factors that can influence ticket sales potential, so you want to check if the artist has had any airplay and/or media exposure in a particular area. As Jacqueline Dahlke, PR & Marketing Manager at the German concert promoter Wizard Promotions, shared last year about Soundcharts (emphasis added):

“When we’re setting up a tour route … Soundcharts allows us to get an audience breakdown by city and find out where the artist’s fans actually live. That is especially useful when working with some of the smaller artists coming to Germany for the first time: we can check out if they are on any of the local charts and playlists, or if they had any airplay around the country. So if we see that they are mostly played in Berlin or Hamburg, we’d set up a concert in Berlin and Hamburg. Basically, we can check out where the audience is — that is where the value is for us.”

In a nutshell, your data research should focus on getting answers to the following questions:

Marketing the show: The role of paid advertising

Once the decision is made to run an event with a specific artist in a given location, it’s up to the promoter to market the event and sell tickets, in partnership with the agent, the artist and their label. Data helps guide marketing efforts by answering the following questions:

Incumbent ticketing platforms provide not only primary KPIs about sales (e.g. tickets sold, capacity percentage, seating chart, gross revenue, time of purchase), but also secondary KPIs such as sales channels, conversion rates and even ticket transfers. Here’s an example of the kind of data you can see on Ticketmaster’s enterprise-facing mobile app, TM1 Reports:

Ticketing platforms like Eventbrite and Ticketmaster also enable promoters to add pixels to track where sales come from, so that marketers can optimize their digital advertising investments according to which channel shows the best conversion rates.

Paid advertising, especially in the digital space, should be well-targeted with the purpose of amplifying the power of word-of-mouth and social concertgoing behavior. Jared Kristensen, founder of Audience Republic, found that the industry was over-reliant on paid advertising and set out to develop new tools for promoters to reach fans. With his previous experience as a promoter, he started building Audience Republic around the concept, in his own words, that “if your friend is going to an event, that makes you 10x more likely to buy a ticket.”

Promoters often use a combination of tools — including but not limited to first-party data-gathering tools like Audience Republic and Seated, pixel tracking and advertising tools on ticketing platforms and even built-in capabilities on streaming platforms like Spotify — to get more nuanced understandings of their audiences, leading to greater returns on ad spend for lower cost.

Demand, a tool that Google and Pollstar launched in February 2020, also allows agents, promoters and managers to gauge how specific markets are reacting to a particular onsale announcement, based on a combination of search activity and ticket sales. The tool also allows users to research which consumer brands are indexing the most heavily among fans of a given artist, which can be helpful for homing in on specific sponsorship opportunities for tours or digital media assets. (Demand unfortunately shut down in November 2020 due to the pandemic, but plans to “relaunch … when the world can enjoy live events again,” according to their website.)

During the show: The added dimension of health data

Until recently, data collection during live events primarily served profitability and marketing purposes:

Going into 2021, the imperative and complex dimension of health data will be added to live events, to prepare the sector for as smooth of a post-COVID comeback as possible. These new requirements will be enabling the quick adoption of a new generation of event tracking tools, at a much faster pace than initially planned.

In October 2020, Ticketmaster announced a new suite of technology tools called SmartEvent that will offer additional services to event organizers like staggered venue entry, social-distanced seating strategies and digitization of certain aspects of in-venue customer service. There’s been some confusion about whether this new system would require fans to be vaccinated or verify a negative COVID test prior to entering a venue, plus lingering debate about what this means for the secondary market (given that SmartEvent is powered by some of Ticketmaster’s previously developed anti-scalping tech).

In any case, data collected through such applications are much more precise than what event organizers are used to, and will help build stronger fan personas for each venue and event:

Aloompa, Appmiral and atVenu are other examples of apps that can help event organizers gather deeper insights about attendees in real time, in a way that help them better predict and prioritize staffing and stocking needs. Pictured below is a screenshot of a festival heat map provided by the Crowd Connected Colocator technology included in Appmiral’s apps. This kind of real-time event data will become more important than ever in a hybrid online/offline concert world.

One major opportunity that remains untapped in real-time event data analysis revolves around qualitative rather than purely quantitative data. What was the mood and feeling of the room, whether or not it was packed? What kinds of memories or emotional associations are attendees creating and capturing at the event, and/or sharing on social media?

According to Live Nation, 68% of fans who attended an event shared their experience on social media — implying that qualitative layers need to be added to the data mix to provide the full picture of what happens as an event unfolds. With that said, while measuring merchandise sales is easy, measuring what gets published on social media is definitely harder, as artists or venues are not always tagged in such posts or stories. Apart from Pex’s attribution engine, there are very few players able to monitor user-generated content at scale, and close to no option to get these insights with a CRM-oriented purpose in mind.

After the show: Remarketing to fans, within regulations

Data collected on ticketing platforms and during the show can be helpful for remarketing purposes after the fact. The easiest use case is for the promoter to use that data to sell tickets for future shows; other use cases that are more relevant for the artist include updating fans directly about upcoming tours, or reaching out to those who purchased merch to tell them about a new release.

The exact kinds of data that will be available to the artist depends on the promoter’s relationship with the ticketing company, and artists would do well to negotiate mutually beneficial data-sharing agreements with event partners (e.g. promoters leveraging artists’ social channels for marketing, then giving fans the option to subscribe to the artist’s mailing list at the point of ticket purchase). Several newer ticketing and event marketing platforms like Audience Republic and Seated also enable artists to embed their technology on their own websites and retain ownership of the data collected there, e.g. for presale announcements.

It is imperative that data collection be organized carefully, as exchanging data between third parties is under GDPR/CIAA regulations to protect privacy. Artists and their teams need to make sure that they have the right to use the data collected in the contracts they form with their partners, at least for their own marketing purposes. Partners also need to make sure they comply with data protection laws, so that the artist can be legally granted the access that they need. The MMF’s Fan Data Guide is a great, actionable resource for navigating this regulatory and commercial landscape.

Conclusion: The evolving role of livestreaming

To close out the discussion, any conversation about the future of data in live music has to include livestreaming.

Given that everything happening online gets measured, data before, during and after online events becomes more accessible than ever before, especially for partners outside the agency and promoter landscape.

“One of the main differences now is that the artist is really the promoter,” says Diana Gremore, the business intelligence analyst at Paradigm quoted earlier in this piece. “You can’t really rely on a promoter as much as you would normally to sell tickets. The potential audience is now wherever your fanbase is, not just the promoter’s usual geographic market.”

In addition, the meaning of “local” marketing takes a different shape online: In Gremore’s words, “instead of events being geographically local, they are local to online communities.” (This runs parallel to how former Apple Music executive Ian Rogers has characterized “local” in the age of the Internet as “shared interests, regardless of geography.”)

As a result of this direct connection, artists and their managers can own more data around their performances. They can engage directly with attendees, get statistics about their real-time digital behaviors and potentially include their contacts in the artist’s own CRM — capabilities that are usually difficult to impossible to achieve in the realm of physical events, where the promoter doesn’t always get to share such information with the artist.

This means that in 2021, we can expect to see more direct, if heated, conversations among managers, labels, agents and promoters around event data ownership. Recent deals like BMG’s acquisition of indie concert promoter Undercover and Eventbrite’s acquisition of ToneDen (a popular advertising tool for artists and labels) point to how the quest for data may lead to previously siloed companies on the recorded and live sectors converging at a faster rate than before. Dominique Casimir, BMG’s EVP Repertoire & Marketing for Continental Europe, confirmed in an interview that “data is an important part” of the company’s acquisition of Undercover, “giving us access to information about an artist’s keenest fans.”

There are also major behavioral differences that must be taken into account when designing and marketing a virtual event, including less advance promotion required for a livestream. For instance, Seated recently reported that over 50% of all its ticket sales for livestreams happened in just the 48 hours leading up to an event. This is the inverse of how tour rollouts normally work for in-person events, where artist-, venue- or sponsor-branded presales might be staggered over the course of a week or longer before the official onsale date, which can be several months ahead of the actual event itself.

In a livestreaming world, this means that event teams need to be much more agile around their planning, reacting in real time based on engagement they see with artists online.

The business case for livestreaming is slowly materializing, as the industry warms up more to the idea of charging for access to online shows. Event organizers around the world are looking to integrate livestreams into their in-person shows once they return — and professionals in the sector need the data transparency and literacy to make the most of these new conditions. As Gremore puts it: “We are setting up tools to be prepared to be in it for the long haul.”