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Aspen Live Music Conference

I appreciate the love. I really do. Though I’m not entirely sure why it’s coming iggli’s way. Yesterday, I headed up to Aspen, Colorado with Nanette to attend the Aspen Live music conference. On the way, we stopped to pick up Alex White, CEO of The Next Big Sound, and we managed, with the help of Google maps, to take the scenic route from the last leg of the trip between Glenwood Springs to Aspen. But the weather was sunny and the sky and terrain were beautiful.

I knew things were going to be a bit strange when I walked into the conference room, and I was the first person there. This never happens. Never. I seriously wondered whether I had come to the right place. But within ten minutes or so, folks started to trickle in. [Noticeably absent for this session: Bob Lefsetz. We missed you!]

Jim Lewi, the conference organizer and chief rabble rouser, had another personal story to tell. I won’t tell it here. Suffice to say, Jim ALWAYS has something interesting happening. Always. (Jim, I do hope your package arrived.)

As things got underway, Jim laid out the theme for the afternoon’s discussion: Compression of Purchase Decision Time & How it Affects Our Marketing. A couple key ideas drove the conversation:

• consumers are waiting till the last minute to make purchasing decisions
• we’ve somehow managed to train the fan to wait till the last minute to purchase a concert ticket
• the live music experience can be wildly uneven, and some artists just don’t seem to have the capacity to move the entire crowd in the way that others do
• the ticketing fee add-0ns aren’t doing us any favors when it comes to encouraging fans to buy tickets early; they wait till the last minute to save money and keep their options open
• there are some things that “work” for marketing live music, maybe we ought to pay attention to these things and try to figure out what we can do to adopt these practices
• where’s the data?
• why is it that Amazon can speak so personally to its customers, but in the music industry we seem ignorant about so many things, including: who we’re talking to, what they did with us last time, what they want now, how to talk with them, etc.
• “I get so many things from so many promoters, it’s ridiculous and overwhelming.”
• how can we “prime the pump” and provide a good way to get a solid contingent of fans into early decision mode so they can talk about the event, and we can point to them talking about the event?
• is anyone really everaging the sharing that fans do via social media – Facebook, Twitter, Digg, etc. – by providing them with the content about the show/artist that they can share with their friends?
• fan driven “word-of-mouth” is the best marketing

During the course of these discussions, Jim kept hinting that maybe Tom Higley and iggli had some solutions that could be helpful to the industry. And Jamie Loeb of Nederlander Concerts was kind enough to talk about some of the benefits that iggli provides.

But the truth is, iggli is being oversold. Again, I really appreciate the love. But we still don’t provide the powerful, compelling solution that I envision: a service that every artist, promoter, venue, sports team, agent and ticket seller wants to use to help promote the event and sell more tickets – via fan-based word-of-mouth. We still have a long, long way to go. But in just a few weeks you’ll be able to see real progress. iggli has created the beginnings of a real-time, event based engine for social interaction. And that engine comes with its own API.

Personally, I think it is this social interaction – real-time fan-to-fan event-based conversations – that will provide the industry with the biggest bang for its marketing buck. What do you think? Let me know!

I had a great time today down in Austin, Texas. My panel on Digital Distruption, the first one of the day, included executives from Disney, Sports Illustrated, Electronic Arts and the Houston Rockets. The other three panels focused on ticketing, entrepreneurship and social media.

Red McCombs (a remarkable entrepreneur after whom the business school is named) shared a bunch of colorful stories culled from his long and successful experience as an entrepreneur. Larry Martin of the MBA talked about a couple of particularly interesting startups, including Groupon. Derek Palmer of Tickets.com, spoke about being agnostic about who sells the tickets.

Barry Khan of Qcue, a pioneer in dynamic pricing and Russ Stanley of the San Francisco Giants discussed their test of dynamic pricing with just 2,000 of the SF Giants’ seats. The test was so successful that the project will be expanded next year to include all 40,000 of the available seats.

On the entrepreneur panel, Randy Cohen of Ticket City; Bart Knaggs of Capital Sports & Entertainment; Greg Morrow of SportNet and Gary Hoover (Entrepreneur-in-Residence) shared stories and perspectives about what it takes to be an entrepreneur. Passion, passion and more passion. A tolerance for risk. A willingness to sell, sell, sell.

Throughout the conference, the impact of technology and social media was beginning to be apparent. Michael Feferman, from C3 Presents, led the social media panel, which included Jim Lutz of Pro Player Connect (in Nashville) who talked about Pro Player and also about Nimbit – direct artist-to-fan sales; Adam Miner of SportNet; Tommy Landry of RotoExperts; and Nicole Blum of Hashi Productions.

I heard a lot about the need for a deep understanding of analytics. It’s great that we’re able to collect the data, but if we don’t understand what that data means, it isn’t really very helpful. And even if we have the data and know what it means, if we don’t have a plan to execute – the desire and the capacity to take the appropriate actions based on what we have gleaned from the data – that really doesn’t help us much either.

Back in 1993, when I was still a practicing lawyer, I went to lunch with a good friend of mine. He was the head of the Cable Television company, and my law firm represented his company. At the time everyone seemed to be preoccupied with the notion of 500 channels of TV, and he was troubled by this. During our lunch, he turned to me and said,

Now remember, this was before YouTube. It was before social networks. It was even before email and the web were in common use. Nobody was talking much about user generated content in those days. But the truth is, the elements were already there, the groundwork already in place, to precipitate a revolution.

When Tim Berners Lee invented the world wide web and Marc Andreesen and his buddies at NCSA created Mozilla, the first really important graphical web browser, they laid the groundwork for an explosion, a big bang in the universe that is “content.” And ironically, from the moment that happened, content has ceased to be “king.” You remember the expression, of course. But “content is king” only when content is scarce, controlled and meted out. Today content is cheaper to create, cheaper to store, and cheaper to distribute than ever before. And there are many many more “producers” of content than there were in 1993. The world will never be the same.

All of this has an enormous impact on music and on the music business. There is more recorded music available today than ever before. Orders of magnitude more music. People listen to more music today than ever before in the history of the world. And increasingly, they’re distributing that music (sharing) and even creating it themselves.

Every copy of Apple’s OSX comes with a copy of Garage Band. Programs like Garage Band, Logic, Ableton Live, Cubase, Pro Tools, Reason, Sonar and others have made it possible for nearly anyone to record or compile “music” that may be completely original (and fall anywhere on the scale from sublime to unbearable) or utterly derivative. Artists have long been treating this vast collection of content as source material for the inspiration and support of their further creative efforts, including Grandmaster Flash, Dr. Dre, The Bastie Boys, Eminem, Moby, and a legion of artists with names that begin with “DJ” and end with pretty much any other word or expression you can imagine.

And the thing that amazes me most about all of this? That the transition from mere spectator to full participant hasn’t been more widely understood, embraced and appreciated. I’d like to introduce you to someone who does get it: Suzanne Lainson. Suzanne writes the blog “brands + music (bpm),” has some interesting things to say about this in the context of music. A week ago, some people from the music, tech and marketing/advertising space got together as part of the Jim Lewi inspired “First Thursday,” here in Boulder. Suzanne was among them, and during the course of our discussions, it became apparent that (a) she’s tired of hearing so many people in the industry say the same things over and over again, and (b) she has a different point of view about what needs to happen – a perspective I happen to share.  Rather than steal her thunder, I invite you to read her most recent post, “Involving Music Fans at Many Levels” for yourself.

One of the things I particularly appreciate about Suzanne’s post: she wants to know what you think, and she asks you to respond. Instead of simply speaking her mind and leaving things at that, she has invited you to join in a conversation – precisely the thing she things needs to be happening in the music industry. And I can’t wait to read what you have to say.

iggli is happy to be working closely with Global Digital Syndication to provide invite services for tonight’s Jowell y Randy concert. Global Digital Syndication is working with uVu Mobile(TM), a mobility solutions and software provider to promote the first streaming concert event through ClickConcert.

Jowell y Randy

Use iggli to connect to Jowell y Randy

During the coming weeks, I’m planning to do something a little different with the iggli blog. We’ve managed to get to know quite a few people in the sports and entertainment, technology and ticketing industries. Some of them are very well known, others maybe not so much. But they all have a unique voice and a particularly valuable point of view. These folks will be “guest” bloggers from time-to-time, offering their own perspectives on everything from social media and marketing, the music industry’s challenges, new developments in sports marketing, friend-to-friend communication, ticketing (including primary and secondary market ticketing, paperless tickets, dynamic pricing) and more. We’ll see where it all goes, but wherever they take us, I know it will be interesting, educational and entertaining. In the meantime, go listen to some music or watch a game!

iggli just came off a remarkable week. If you check out iggli.com, you’ll notice dramatic changes to the website and to virtually every aspect of the service.

New partners.

During the last week we added support for AEG Live – check out the Ogden and Bluebird Theaters in Denver – and the WNBA. The Ogden and Bluebird, two of the premier venues in Denver, have begun to use the service on their event pages. Now when you find an interesting event, a great artist coming to either of these venues, you’ll be able to use iggli’s invite service to invite your friends.

The WNBA went live with iggli at the end of this past week. An extraordinary site and organization, you’ll find iggli’s invitation services used on the WNBA’s schedule pages.

New website look and feel. New event search.

We’re pretty excited about this, and we think you will be too. You can now use iggli’s home page to search for music and sporting events anywhere in the United States. (We’re not trying to leave anyone out, but we need to take a step at a time.) Enter a zip code, a city name, an artist or venue name, even the name of a sports team. Choose from among tens of thousands of available events. And, of course, invite your friends.

In the coming days we’ll be blogging about some of the other key changes to our services, including

• New top level navigation.
• New igg.li short URL services.
• New partner reports.
• New event pages.
• And more.

Stay tuned!

Facebook has provided a new attention-getting tool that you’ll want to know about if you are an artist, promoter, or venue responsible for promoting events, You already know that you can use iggli’s invitation services to leverage the power of email. Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. Now Facebook lets you use the @ symbol to get the attention of a particular person. You can read more about the service in the September 15, 2009 edition of Inside Facebook.

Here’s how the new feature works. Suppose you’re posting an update to a band’s status and you want me to know. For example, Crosby, Stills and Nash are playing the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles on September 23rd. You go to the status box and type: Hey @ . . . and you’ll be given the option to add the name of any of your Facebook friends. So, you type, Hey @ Tom Higley let’s go see Crosby, Stills and Nash at the Greek! Presto, I get a message saying I’ve been tagged by you in a status update. Give it a try!

A note about CS&N. Their 1969 release was one of the first two albums I ever bought. I was probably 13 or 14 years old. While Young wasn’t yet a member of the group or featured on this recording, he made his appearance on DéjåVu and who could forget Ohio in 1970? Released when I was still a junior in high school, it had a pretty powerful impact on me and on everyone I knew.

It’s nice when your company generates a little attention in the press. It’s nicer still when so much of what is written is on the money. Yesterday the Boulder Daily Camera covered iggli’s invitation service – invite – and left readers with the impression that we’d like to see our button used on every online listing of ticketed events. That’s accurate. They also accurately captured a couple other key notions:

• that events are social
• that the friends who are going to a particular event are often as important (or more important) than the event itself
• that most people pay more attention to information or invitations from friends

And the part they really got right, the part I particularly liked, was the notion that “one click of the widget” helps folks get through a process that would otherwise be tedious, time consuming and filled with frustration. You’ll know this is true if you’ve ever tried to invite more than two people to a concert or a playoff game. The process is ridiculous.

• Which event?
• Which friends should I invite?
• Do I talk to them by phone to see if their interested? Text? Email? Facebook? Twitter?
• How do I deal with the fact that some of my friends use Facebook (and won’t read email) and some use email exclusively (and won’t touch Facebook)?
• How do I keep track of those who respond?
• How many tickets do we need?
• Who is going to buy them?
• How are we going to handle reimbursement?
• Will we all get to sit together?
• How do we get the best seats?
• What if someone can’t make it at the last minute?
• What’s the best way to communicate with the whole group about our plans on the day of the show or game?

There’s more. But you get the idea. The process can be . . .  problematic.

iggli’s invite service has been designed as a way to deal with these issues. It’s not perfect. We have a long way to go to make the service as easy to use, useful, and fun as we think it should / could be. So feedback is welcome and appreciated! One of the biggest shortcomings of the service is the relatively few places you can find it or use it.  If you’re a fan who wants to take a group to see a Lakers game, a show at Red Rocks, the Michael Jackson memorial concert at Staples Center or anyone of a thousand different events around the country, you’re going to be out of luck for at least another few weeks. Because right now, you can only use the service if our invite widget appears on an event page.

We’ve already made substantial progress in this department. Today iggli’s services have been embraced by Nederlander Concerts, The Greek Theatre, The Grove Theater, Bill Silva Entertainment and Management, Jason Mraz and StubHub. And we have some big deals to talk about in the not-too-distant future. But things will really get interesting when you can use iggli’s service with just about any event you can find. And that capability is right around the corner. So please, stay tuned!

U2 - Photo by Phil Romans, October 3, 2005

It seems appropriate at this point to say a few things about why we built iggli’s invite service and what we think that service will mean for iggli’s partners and for the fans. We often say that great events are social. Whether you’re planning a night out to see your favorite local band or U2 in a packed stadium or maybe the LA Lakers, you will probably end up going with one or more friends. Often the decision to attend a particular event may have little to do with the featured artist or the teams that are playing. Because people often choose to attend an event because they want to spend time with the group that is going to the event or the person who sent out the invitations. To put it another way: it’s about the people.

Brad Feld reflects on a similar epiphany in a recent blog post: “It’s All About the Faces.” (No, he isn’t talking about Rod Stewarts’ bandmates in the Gasoline Alley / Maggie May era.) He reflects on his experience of changing his Twitter avatar from a photo to a graphic designed by Anthony Dimitre. Brad’s experience with this, and with the profile images that Gist makes available (via a Google search) was interesting. It boils down to this. We have an important, powerful and emotional connection to people. Our connections to people influence our behavior. And when we take an approach to software and services that leaves people out of the picture, or when we do things that ignore or constrain the basic human connection, the end result is something less powerful and less satisfying.

Back to iggli. It seemed curious to us that despite all the great, social events people attend, no one had developed an effective model for connecting people-to-people and friend-to-friend as part of the experience of deciding to attend an event. Please don’t get me wrong. I know there are more than enough invitation-oriented web services available. While Evite may be the most familiar, a dozen others exist, including Anyvite, Center’d, MyPunchbowl, Socializr, Eventbrite and more. Each of them has its own particular emphasis, and most of them are worth a look.

Nederlander Concerts - Schedule Page

But none of these services has focused on the space iggli has carved out: an industry standard “invite friends” service that has been designed from the first line of code to provide value to fans (”Power to the People”) and to iggli’s partners (venues, promoters, artists, sports teams and ticket sellers). iggli’s “invite friends” service is different in another respect. The button that invokes the service can be found on the event site iteslf. For example, one of our partners is Nederlander Concerts. A look at the event schedule for The Greek Theatre (in LA) or The Grove (in Annaheim)  reveals the “invite friends” button that provides the doorway into iggli’s service.

The "invite friends" widget

And since iggli began providing its “invite friends” service for Nederlander Concerts,  more partners have begun to embrace the service, inluding Bill Silva Entertainment and Management, Jason Mraz and the largest secondary market ticketing service in the world, StubHub. Why are they using our service? Several reasons. First, the service makes it really fast and easy for a fan to invite a numbeer of his or her friends to a concert or a sporting event and to publicize the event via Twitter, Facebook or MySpace. And getting back to what we were saying (it’s all about the people) there is no better way to promote an event than to get one friend talking to other friends about the event. We help bring to life that powerful conversation among friends.

There’s much more to the service than the basic tools for sending invitations to Facebook and MySpace friends. But I’ll leave those features for another post. The bottom line is very simple: the friend-to-friend communication of our “invite service” helps partners sell more tickets and helps fans connect the events they care about with the friends they care about.

The New Face of EventStream

SOME of the recent improvements to iggli’s invite service:

1. New fan-friendly and interactive user interface that makes it much easier to invite friends and coordinate ticket purchases

2. Login via Facebook™ username and pasword and publication to Facebook™ Friends

3. Calendar support to add event dates to personal calendars (Google®, Yahoo®, Outlook® and iCal® are all supported)

4. New iPhone® inspired, sliding interface that helps fans express their intent to participate

5. Group ticketing tools that let an organizer volunteer and coordinate with members of the group to buy tickets more effectively

We look forward to your feedback, and we’d love to hear what you think of the changes.

A visit our partner page (http://iggli.com/blog/partners) shows just how easy signup and setup can be.

Tom Higley
President & CEO