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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.

This past Friday, iggli, inc. CEO, Tom Higley (@tomhigley), was a presenter at Ticket Summit in Las Vegas July 15-17. Held twice a year, Ticket Summit is a 3 day gathering of movers and shakers in the secondary ticketing market. The list of keynote speakers was impressive, to say the least: Ray Waddell of Billboard, Chris Tsakalakis of StubHub, and Joe Cohen of Seatwave. This conference was particularly interesting because of the increased focus on the role of social media. Ticket Network, the sponsors of Ticket Summit, went all out with their own social media efforts by creating a Facebook event page and tweeting live from the conference via a conference specific Twitter account, @Ticket_Summit.

As the creator of invite, an app geared specifically to ticketed events, it only made sense that Tom be present to share his knowledge during the two social media sessions that were held on Friday (July 17).

The first session began at 10am and was titled Web 2.0: Linking Social Media & The Ticket Business. Other panelists included Cliff Kurtzman of My City Rocks (@MyCityRocks), Joe Koufman of Enguage Digital (@GumboShowJoe), & Robert Land of Social Nomads (@RobertLand). Below is a copy of Tom’s presentation for this session.

Web 2.0 Linking Social Media _ The Ticket Business _Tom Higley_ –

The afernoon session began at 2pm and was titled Web 2.0: Apps to Expand your Market Base. Tom was once again joined by Cliff Kurtzman of My City Rocks for this session which was focused more specifically on the social media apps that can prove most helpful to ticket sellers in expanding the reach of their marketing efforts. Below is Tom’s presentation for that session.

Web 2.0 Apps to Expand Your Market Base _Tom Higley_ –

For more information on Ticket Summit, visit www.ticketsummit.org.
If you are interested in adding invite to your site, please visit our partner page at http://iggli.com/partners

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