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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.

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.

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

Follow us on Twitter: @iggli

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!

Iggli brings social climate of concerts, sporting events to Web

By Jean Spencer Camera Staff Writer
Monday, July 6, 2009

Photo by Mark Leffingwell

In 2007, Tom Higley founded iggli, an online, friend-to-friend communication network specifically designed to provide entertainment industry enthusiasts a forum for communicating about upcoming events and shows.

The idea, Higley said, is to bring the social-nature of concerts to an online medium.

“Concerts, live music and sporting events are social,” Higley said. “People want to go with their friends. In fact, sometimes it matters more who is going to the concert than who is actually playing.”

One click of the iggli widget — which lies embedded on ticket sales, venues and promoters’ web pages — allows users instant access to see upcoming shows, buy tickets and invite their friends to events through e-mail or linking to preferred social networking sites such as Facebook or Twitter. The button is a green square with three horizontal white dots.

Higley said the iggli widget eliminates the nightmare of logistics fans must coordinate when attending a show by providing a “one-stop shop” for ticket purchases and schedule coordination.

Fans can track events, post comments, coordinate concert schedules and communicate about up-and-coming shows, Higley said.

“You no longer have to call all your friends to see who will buy the tickets and who is going or not going,” Higley said. “You can go to one spot and see it all.”

The widget benefits business partners — typically ticketing sites, venues, promoters or sports teams — by generating more awareness of events and making ticket sales easier for customers.

Boulder’s Fox Theatre and Boulder Theater already use the service. Sarah Coffield, publicist at the Boulder Theater, said it has “definitely boosted sales.”

“It’s been a great value and asset to the theater,” said Collier, adding that she’s seen fans from 14- to 60-years-old learn to use the system.

Iggli recently announced that Grammy nominated singer-songwriter Jason Mraz will be the first artist to implement the service.

The green widget is now integrated into Mraz’s official Web site in time to support his summer 2009 Gratitude Café Tour.

This follows a May announcement that Bill Silva Entertainment, Mraz’s management company that also manages James Morrison, Robert Francis and Vices, would integrate the invite service to all of its sites.

Ryan Chisholm, a manager at Bill Silva Entertainment, said he is excited about the possibilities that the iggli widget will provide for Mraz’s fans.

“Jason’s fans are very devoted,” he said, adding the iggli widget is the “perfect model for fans to really get involved and eventually drive ticket sales.”

Higley, who has successfully started up five other technology companies in recent years, hopes the iggli widget becomes an iconic symbol, plugged into every ticket sale, venue and artist page found on the Web.

“It’s just the beginning,” he said. “I expect to see that button everywhere you go to buy tickets soon.”

E.W. Scripps Co.
© 2006 Daily Camera and Boulder Publishing, LLC.

Click here to see the original article.

A legend. The late Tom Dowd was for many years the most extraordinary figure in music and technology. He worked on the Manhattan Project (the Atomic Bomb) and then worked as an engineer and producer for Atlantic Records. The artists he recorded and / or produced include Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Thelonius Monk, Aretha Franklin, Eric Clapton, The Rascals, James Gang and so many more. He was the first to use stereo on a record. He pioneered the use of eight-track recording for popular music. And because of his vision and drive, Atlantic Records became the first record company to record using multiple tracks.

Tom Higley
President & CEO
iggli, inc.

Originally posted by Tom as a Comment on Facebook after joining the Facebook group, Induct Tom Dowd into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

Read more about Tom Dowd