Just wanted to get some feedback on a project I just launched called RoadPony: www.roadpony.com
It's a platform make it easier for performers to book shows in areas where they have the best opportunities for solid attendance and income.
It's also a platform that will allow fans to show performers their interest in the performer and entice them to come to their area to play.
The current version is just to gauge interest with lite features.
Artists can create a profile with links, photos, bio, and music. And they can see who favorited their profile and who and where they are requested to play.
Fans can create a profile to favorite and request artists in their city and state at a specific venue.
If there’s enough interest, we’ll build out the campaign element.
Let me know if you have and questions, issues or suggestions!
I played in some local bands for fun years ago and went on some self-funded tours. I also booked and promoted shows (mostly for my own bands). The way that we got most of our gigs was through networking with other bands, bookers, promoters, etc. After we got to be well-known, bands from out of town contacted us for help with local gigs, and we’d book it with a friendly local venue and promote it ourselves. It was a lot of effort, but it was a really good time.
There are an endless number of bands like that. They don’t need a bounty, they are going to go on tours regardless. What they do need is a good local band that they can open for and a good venue to play at. After a few tours to the same cities, maybe they can headline.
Booking a tour is a royal pain. Every venue has a different contact system and different requirements for how to get booked, and you have to book it 6 months to a year in advance. If you don’t play your cards just right, you do not get booked— or worse, you get booked with a band that doesn’t show up and without promotion. Honestly, the best shows are house parties anyways.
Hey thanks for the feedback! I've been in this boat as well as a touring performer myself.
Bands may book tours regardless of the "bounty", but you could apply this same method on top of using RoadPony. Only now, you would have a better idea of how many people you and the local band you booked could bring out and if those people are interested enough in seeing you, they'll place that bounty, which you will collect.
Now that you've applied your method using RoadPony as a tool, you know you'll be getting this revenue and about how many fans will show up before you even book the show.
If RoadPony can find a niche in the crowdfunding market, I think it could work. Give bands some benefits or features that existing crowdfunding platforms don’t, and they’ll use it.
A few companies experimented with this model in the early 2010s, Queremos! In Brazil (https://techcrunch.com/2012/09/10/queremos/ ), Songkick had their own product with Songkick Detour, then there is Alive in Japan (which I own). As far as I know no one managed to get the model to work in a big way and everyone had to abandon it or pivot to make decent revenues (including me).
I really enjoyed my crowdfunding platform journey, however having now toured hundreds of bands I can see flaws in the business model that I was naive to as a first time founder with limited experience of touring bands.
I do respect what you are trying to do and getting bands playing in the right places is a valuable problem to solve. However I don't think crowdfunding/crowdsourcing is the solution. I'd be happy to share my personal experiences working in this sector if it might be of help.
Hey thanks for the insight! I have seen similar platforms but not these specifically. What I have noticed with the services I was able to read up on was that they seemed convoluted as far as usability for the performer and the fan and what the service was trying to accomplish. I don't know if that can be attributed to their lack of success but it was something that I notably wanted to avoid.
The main issue RoadPony is intended to solve is simply - where are we, as performers, in demand. I think additional logistics of the tour, the actual booking of the show, etc. will always have its nooks and crannies that need to be worked out on a person-to-person basis. To start, all we'd like to do is just show the performers the most viable areas to perform in and as a bonus, guarantee them money and an audience (assuming invested fans will show). It's a tool rather than a one-stop-shop solution.
I am very interested in hearing about your experiences if you're willing to share!
We had two sections:
- Who's next (we populated a db with every artist from iTunes and last.fm), users could search for an artist and request them to act as a signal as to who was in demand (and where based on user location)
- Crowdfunded show (Self explanatory I hope)
Basically using the who's next data, we approached bands with the concept of a crowdfunded show. If the band agreed to it the crowdfunding actually worked really well for us because the word of mouth generated by the fans was usually off the charts and we'd already seeded it using who's next. However, the problem was always getting the bands to agree to it, the simple truth is no one wants to book a show that might happen in 6 months time, they can't route a tour and make all the finance work with a maybe. Even if they could, the agent, manager or whoever is the decision maker, is rarely open minded to try these sorts of things - 1 in 10 might agree to it, the rest are not interested, as such the crowdfunders don't happen and fans start to doubt the system's ability to actually see results which leads to less fans using the who's next system.
What I soon found was the data from who's next and my own intuition (which is a big part of this tbh) I could usually make a guess which show would be a hit. I was getting cash rich from shows, I could afford the risk that crowdfunding had until then mitigated. I stopped asking the artists to crowdfund and just did standard bookings - we could book more shows and make more money and avoided the headache of trying to get management to do something which was never going to be in their comfort zone.
What I will say is that, my experience shows the data is important. So ask yourself, can you get data which helps promoters know the show will sell X many tickets in Y market? If you can do that, people will want that data for sure and shows will happen, they don't need to be crowdfunded. That's what you should focus on with RoadPony imho. However, I do not believe crowdsourcing is the best way to do it, the reason is because you need seriously statistically significant numbers across multiple locations - it's really hard to do - how are you going to let people know about your platform to crowdsource in the first place? Attracting users is real tough. Are you confident people will believe it in enough to bother signing up and then listing all their favourite artists? Even then, SongKick (who already had a massive audience who had listed artists they wanted to be reminded about if they came to their town) had a fantastic starting data set, and they could not make Detour work.. I think that tells you a lot about the size you would have to get to to get the data you need.
I would think more about the data itself, are there other networks, facebook likes, locations of twitter mentions, shazams, etc that can be used to build a picture of where artists have an audience. That data could have value to promoters / artists and help guide their booking decisions. Think https://www.chartmetric.com/ for live music.
Still I should qualify, that promoters are a funny bunch, they often book things more for vanity and they have their own methods of deciding how they book what - some will be resistant even if the data tells them to do something else. I remember the CEO at one of the biggest Asian promotion companies told me "We decide what's cool in Asia". Still, I think if you are able to get solid reliable data, that gets results you can force people to pay attention to you.
Came here to say the same thing. I wrote an app that was exactly this almost 10 years ago now, but couldn’t get it to go anywhere. I remember all the other companies you listed as well.
Touring is logistically complicated and there’s likely a software solution that could help ease the pain for tour managers and venues, but crowdfunding a show to show interest in a city is maybe the least of the worries of an artist planning a tour.
But I’d be happy to be wrong and hope the founder has success!
I would love for this to work well, but it really needs a better way to know who is already on the platform. Right now all I can do is search and every artist I tried simply results in an empty results page and a suggestion I contact them. This makes it feel like there's no interest in the platform from the side of performers and you're asking me to volunteer to change that.
It would be much better if I could look at a list of already registered artists with a form to submit a wish for missing artists, with an implication that you'd contact them. Either you have a network in the industry and are more likely to reach them than a random fan, or you don't and this seems unlikely to take off.
You should of course save statistics of fans requesting an artist and where in the world they are, to facilitate convincing them. Maybe even, as another commenter suggested, make this data visible on the site to show users how much interest there is for certain performers.
Thanks for the input! We've been asked for a viewable list of performers a few times and it's definitely something we plan on adding. I agree, searching randomly can be tedious. Especially if the bands you're looking for aren't signed up yet.
We do plan on reaching out to our network of artists to create profiles to make this more user-friendly for the fans.
Awesome concept, I’d love to be able to look up a zip code or location to see what performers are being requested where. You then kind of have a backdoor discovery function for both potential fans and artists.
I’d also suggest showcasing a few artists on the homepage so you naturally start diving into the site.
I agree with the top comment mentioning the big challenge will be getting to critical mass as a platform to be really interesting. NGL it’ll probably take a lot of capital. That said it’s a cool project and I wish you success!
Thanks for checking it out! The search by area idea makes a lot of sense. Finding artists on the site currently seems to be one of the biggest challenges for users who are testing RoadPony.
We do have plans for showcasing artists in the future!
I’m surprised that it’s “perks” and not “get a ticket to the show” which is pretty much the only perk I would be interested in. Swag might be a nice extra but if I’m trying to get a performer to come to my town it’s to see them perform. Clearly I’m at least willing to front one ticket.
Why would I put up less than the cost of a ticket in exchange for a t-shirt or something for the privilege of buying a ticket when I could put up the cost of a ticket and a t shirt which surely would be more enticing?
In recent years artists have turned to selling VIP access as a major source of income on tour. In a lot of music scenes, this is normal and fans are really into it.
So this is a pay upfront kind of deal right? But would that mean I'd have to have money tied up in a bunch of potential events that may be very unlikely? I'm curious how this all works in this respect.
I think it's a pretty neat idea. I would think about how you could integrate with Bandcamp, as the bands you'll attract are a huge part of their band user base: bands whose fan base is small enough that a group pooling their money could influence the tour route, but who are rabid enough about supporting the band that they'll actually try to organize something.
I'm not totally sure how you handle the venue choice, but a crowdsourced database of venues to play at could be useful. If I'm acting as the booking agent, get me to add venue details (capacity, age restrictions, photos, contact info) to a public directory that other users could tap for their own booking. Maybe get small venue owners or booking agents to add/claim/curate their own entries.
This is kinda random, but I also think it would be a cool and unique gesture if the organizer could be given a way to arrange to "feed the band." This is just a very band-centric touch based on the fact that a touring band is always gonna be happy to be given a meal, but if the organizer had a checkbox that, for a fixed additional overhead cost, they could arrange to have a meal delivered, I suspect both bands and fans would think that was awesome. Even if it's just a big pile of big burritos.
We do have lite Bandcamp integration now. But that's just allowing performers to embed their music into their profile so fans can listen. Did you have any specific suggestions in mind regarding Bandcamp?
In the current request form, a fan is asked to request the band in a City, State and at a Venue. Additional venue details like you mentioned is a great idea from the agent's/person booking the show's perspective, but I'm not sure fans would have this information readily available.
As for the organizer idea - we kind of had something similar planned for when the band posts their potential tour stop onto RoadPony. We'd offer them a space to request any specific tour amenities - "we'd love a place to crash in Cleveland, Louisville, and Nashville". Or whatever they may need help with along the way.
My suggestion with Bandcamp was going to be embedding the music from there, since it's not limited to snippets like spotify, so thumbs-up there. I'm not sure what else you could do for integration unless they have a way for you to learn about fan-band relationships and you could use that data.
You need a way to tie in selling merchandise. A lot of bands are basically T-Shirt companies and the music really is just the lead generator. Was in a band once.
It's hard to get something like this to take off without seeding content.
It would probably be a good idea to just create a load of artist accounts with artwork/Spotify links etc, and encourage people to upvote them (or whatever your mechanism is). Then after theirs enough fan interaction, contact the artists and let them know of the activity, and let them claim the account.
Pretty straight forward to get the artist data from Spotify API/Last.fm/Discogs etc.
Good luck, always happy to see new ideas to help musicians.
I would love for this to work, but I'm wondering how well itt actually might?
Performers likely know already where their fans are, especially if they're on services such as Spotify which aggregate location data of listeners.
This reminds me of this one guy in high school who went to a concert abroad to see Alter Bridge and managed to catch up with them as they were about to enter the venue. He tried convincing them to come play in Sweden. They promised to do so if he gathered enough interest and gave him a huge lot of stickers with their logo that he put all over town.
In 2015, a thousand of (mostly italian) musicians played simultaneously "Learn to Flight" as a way to ask the Foo Fighters to visit the town of Cesena, Italy. Dave Grohl then agreed to have their last tour date in Cesena :)
The idea may be promising. But once again this product is a "About Us: We are anonymous. Sign Up: We have no privacy policy". I always wonder why startups find that unimportant.
You're right. It would be beneficial to add some human identity. I also understand the concern about the missing privacy policy. I'll plan on adding this!
2. Organise tour dates for just after the album release
3. Release the album
4. Go on tour
5. Rest
6. Repeat
For a US tour, you're not criss-crossing the country, going from New York to Los Angeles to San Francisco, e.t.c. Tour managers exist because they literally have to solve the Travelling Salesman problem for their clients. Tour buses are a thing because you're just driving to the next town/city along the way.
I'm not sure where RoadPony fits into this touring cycle or helps tour managers in their decision making. It seems to me that it will promote one off gigs without taking care of the logistical problems that bands face.
That’s a very US-centric view and mostly concerns quite established artists with traditional band setups.
DJs tour all day every day, and the current trend in pop music is to just release as many singles and eps and albums as possible (look at the rapper Future for instance). Not too familiar with Jazz but my impression is it’s mostly life on the road as well.
As a former promoter in the EU, I can attest we have many great shows in my city which begin basically with just an email with an offer and a date and then it’s off to the races. Roadpony fits perfectly.
Hundreds, thousands, if not millions of artists across the world would kill for that email. Artists are insatiable when it comes to opportunities like this. Mind you, “rock bands” are a thing of the past. People just pack a laptop and thats it.
Futher, touring bands love to squeeze another gig in. Its basically free money. If you’re going to a festival, and theres a roadpony thing going on to have you play a venue that is local, of course you would just go do that as well.
> If you’re going to a festival, and theres a roadpony thing going on to have you play a venue that is local, of course you would just go do that as well.
Assuming the festival contract doesn't specify exclusivity in the weeks surrounding (something that's actually quite common in my experience).
Exactly. It’s not as easy as saying “oh look, people want to see us” as it is bureaucratic red tape that a festival has to adhere to.
Also, just because people want to see you perform doesn’t mean a venue does. Some venues will only take certain artists, others lack the space, all while more and more smaller to medium sized venues are closing.
Music as a business is evolving to just digital content and marketing. It’s sad.
Yeah, there are things to consider. Everything also depends a whole lot on band size, country, city etc.
Regarding venues, being from a city with around 1 million people, it’s pretty much always a solvable problem. Theaters, movie theaters, music venues, gallerie, stadiums, rented stages... it is, in my experience, a very solvable problem. If it’s a big band, you throw money at the problem, if it’s a small gig, make something fun out of it. The concert only gets better if you put the act somewhere fun or unexpected. I’ve done shows in wine cellars, on ferries etc.
Sure, alternative venues are a lot of fun. I used to play in an open space, in a square, at the end of a cul-de-sac, coffee shops... these don’t necessarily warrant something like the OP’s solution though. I haven’t been in music in quite some time but when I was I would have killed for an app that connected me with venues rather than with fans. I had my own avenues for that. A website, MySpace, mailing list. Now I imagine it would be Facebook and SoundCloud and the like...
I played punk music and because of that, venue selection was limited to those with the insurance coverage ;) Any mom & pop place quickly turned us down.
Cheers, sounds like good fun :) many venues these days are pretty much automated. Live Nation has direct access to the calendar of the most populat venue in my city. They dont consult the venue, they just add bands to the calendar. A venue-connecting app would do nothing for you in that (maybe specific, but not uncommon id wager, given live nations size) example.
This is a good point. However, I'm sure if you presented proof to a venue that you already have a large number of paying showgoers ready to see you in this city if you perform in the near future, convincing the venue to book you will be much easier than just an estimated head count or trying to use the numbers from your last area performance.
We're planning on working assistance to cover the venue/promoter costs as well. So given that the demand is high enough for the performer, I don't see why the venue would turn them down if they could present info like this.
Very good point. You definitely have leverage showing up to a booking meeting with head counts. What guarantees do you have they show up though? I played a few gigs where we thought we would have more numbers. In fact that experience lead to us youngsters turning towards getting a college education instead of playing to an empty room. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for what you all are up to. My experience was 20 some years ago so it’s totally different now.
Yeah, that is common. I guess it also depends on the definition of “local”. If you’re flying from spain to play in Hamburg, playing in Berlin is not “local”, but would still make good business sense.
I think this is more a case of the laptop being the 21st century guitar, than any instrument being "obsoleted". The trends in popular music have followed a min-maxing of physical logistics, loudness of sound, and timbral flexibility relative to the era and setting:
The railroad preceded the rise of the large, Sousa-style marching band, which also made use of the loudest instruments of the era(brass). After electric amplication set in you got an era of radio crooners and smaller-piece popular groups, which ultimately gravitated towards the now familar guitar-keys-drums arrangements by midcentury as the nascent rock band could fit that gear on a bus and get a wide timbral variety with use of amplification and effects without relearning the instruments. The guitar in particular has a good ergonomic profile while also being amenable to amplification and effects, hence the stereotype of the "travelling guitarist" coincides with its central role in large arena rock productions where a three or four-piece plays to an audience of tens or hundreds of thousands.
The laptop fits in with the trend by being even smaller, more portable, more flexible. It fills in nearly every need for back-up, so a solo act can sound as big as desired. And it can be used in its own right as a performance instrument, though computer keyboards aren't tremendously expressive interfaces in the way guitar strings are. (For that, there is always someone selling some kind of new controller interface idea. Though they have a habit of not sticking...)
I at least have gone the other way, I watch Facebook live performances or other recorded live things like Postmodern Jukebox or deWolff. I'm tired of the overproduced soulless studio music.
Implying that the only musicians that tour are the ones on the Billboard 100 is a little disingenuous. There are countless "traditional instrument" bands from genres like indie/folk all the way to blackened death metal that are constantly releasing music and touring.
Also, love it or hate it, modern country music is extremely popular in parts of the US, and that's (mostly) traditional instruments as well.
Yeah i was being flippant. That said, it really is eye opening looking at hit lists. Also, i have deep respect for country, but even that genre is heavily influenced by trap and dance music these days. Wild.
And that's a very DJ-centric way of looking at. A DJ might be able to have an itinerary like Dublin -> Frankfurt -> Birmingham -> Prague but when it comes to a band and all their equipment, they generally would look for a route that minimises travel-time and cost.
> I'm not sure where RoadPony fits into this touring cycle or helps tour managers in their decision making.
It provides strong confirmed information on where the fans are. With it the tour manager can know for certain how big a crowd they can expect in each city before they even start planning. Its up to them after this to decide where to go and where not to go to make the tour viable.
> It seems to me that it will promote one off gigs...
Why do you think so? I don’t see the fan pledges as binding on the band. If a band runs an album release campaign and when the numbers are in they can see that they have 10 fans in Miami and 10 fans in Anchorage and nothing else that just means that they are not ready for touring yet so they won’t.
The kind of information RoadPony can provide is especially usefull on the margins. You don’t need to be a genius to know that huge band in a huge metropolis will find enough interest. But it might show if the time is right for a smaller band to start touring, or might show which smaller cities are viable tour stops for the huge band.
Again, tour managers don’t route tours. This entire thread is classic HN... interesting perspectives, but mostly a bunch of ‘smart’ people trading notes/ideas on topics/industries they know nothing about and/or read about once and now feel confident speaking on incorrectly.
> It provides strong confirmed information on where the fans are
You mean like promoters who put up guarantees? Pretty sure it’s not difficult to figure out which markets acts should travel to... follow the money...
It sounds like you've got a bee in your bonnet about terminology. Surely there's one entity that decides how to route the tour. If so, who does it? If not, how does it work?
You're right. The about page offers more information specifically aimed at performers which addresses my concerns about 'routes': https://www.roadpony.com/about/
Hey thanks for the feedback! RoadPony would be step 3.5 in this sequence. I'll try to explain how it's intended to help.
It isn't meant to solve all logistical hurdles when it comes to touring but rather give agencies/artists more accurate insight into where they can be most successful as far as revenue and draw.
You'd be able to see what fans (and where they are) are willing to pay for a tickets to the show (because they already have via the bid on their city) in select areas. The performer can then look at this data and see, for example, "it looks like we have a strong fan base on the east coast due to the requests/bids we've received on these east coast cities"
Now the band knows that if they book on the east coast in those cities, they're at the very least going to collect the money that was generated via the bids from RoadPony. These fans are already invested so they're more likely going to show up to the show as well.
It's gives you the opportunity to validate markets in cities before you even book them. You'll still have to book the show in those cities, but you'll now know that your efforts are much more validated if you used the data provided by RoadPony.
Hope this clears things up. Let me know if you have any suggestions!
They could easily build in rules to accommodate this and even add a marketplace for companies who can bid to organise lighting rigs and venues and all other associated tour activities. I think what they are building could eventually be thought of as a control panel for bands (any bands) to be able to plan AND finance their tours with their fans. It’s completely genius if they take it far enough (and probably a billion dollar company if they get it right)!
Very US centric and very bias towards established acts with a large following.
That is not the cycle for every band. I'm sure there are plenty of bands willing to travel a few hours for a one off gig, especially in smaller countries. Bands where they may be fairly popular online but haven't done any tours as yet.
I perfectly fits my experience in Germany, so probably not US- but established-band centric (as in: they make money off spotify, though not necessarily enough to live off of it).
Bookings almost exclusively go through the band's agency, 6 to 12 months in advance. Tour logistics are a major part of costs on the band's side. Smaller bands without an agency usually also only have a very small local following, meaning not enough guests to pay the people at the venue, meaning the mostly are not booked by the venue, outside of labor-of-love events of some employees at the venue.
Eventful, founded by Brian Dear (a regular HN poster) had this as a feature before it was acquired if I recall correctly. I think the feature had a decent level of success, so it’d be worth talking to him/getting him to post about learnings here.
Seems like an awesome idea, but the first thing I see when looking at it is that's one big chicken and egg problem - it'll be an awesome platform if it gathers a critical mass of bands and users, but before then probably will feel like a dead place for a long time. What's your plan for overcoming that?
Thanks! And yes, that is one of the major hurdles right now. Currently, we're working on tapping into our personal, music industry networks to start the first round of performer signups.
Right now, we're basically in a "gathering feedback to see if this is worth pursing" stage. So if we decide there is enough interest, and once we build out the campaign element, and can prove that this model works with some successful campaigns hopefully it will get some legs over time.
I would prefer we had a stone cold plan for growth but right now we're taking it day by day and seeing what feedback we can get as we move forward. I would appreciate any ideas you might have!
One of the problems bands solve while planning tours is organizing shared gigs with some local band[s] of choice. It usually helps to establish your position on the scene (if artist X plays on a gig with artist Y you're safe to assume they share some musical similarities). This way bands share and expand their audiences.
Oh my, is it hard to find suitable local bands ready to play on given dates! If a platform could track bands that are ready to play in a specific location on certain dates and offered this to other bands (possibly, only to a whitelist of bands/genres), that would be great.
The more I think of it, the more I see it could be useful not only to touring bands. At the moment, most multi-act gigs are organized by venues, some system which promotes inter-band planning could give more control to performers.
You can't minimize the role of the producer/promoter. Someone has to manage the business and financing aspects of signing up the venue. RoadPony should also provide this service and enable venues to sign up and possibly promote the show. You've got to take tickets, provide security, housekeeping, etc. It's actually a key element in automating this approach to live music.
Bands that can do a one night show can fill in gaps in venue calendars.
Concerts have fans and performers, but they also have venues. The venues need to be a part of this as well. What's your pitch to them? Why would they give you a cut? Who gets what cut of the pre-purchases?
I think an app should focus on connecting bands and venues, not bands and fans. One uncommon, but useful problem to solve is when a band, say they're travelling from DC on Friday night to Gainesville, FL for a Sunday show, wants to perform somewhere in between the two dates (maybe their show in Asheville, NC got cancelled for some reason). There's a club in Wilmington, NC that wants some live music on Saturday. In that way, you help everyone. Even if we're not talking about touring bands, clubs can post open nights, bands can say we're available in this radius, etc.
I thought that Soundcloud would have tried that a long time ago. There's so much potential for emerging artists, and giving data to the venue about how many people will an artist bring/where to promote the event seems really needed. Good luck with that project, love the idea !
Will be hard to pre sell tickets on this platform then convert to a venue’s ticket. Most of them have exclusive ticketing deals that won’t allow this or severely limit % that can be sold. That’s why the focus is on “perks”
I think one way to get around this would be to show the venues the money has already been made. This includes the price of tickets. If there are ticketing deals involved, it could be something like a straight cash exchange: We have 100 people who gave money for entry. Here's x amount money for 100 tickets.
I’m not sure about the bounty idea, but I’ll tell you what does work if you want your favorite undiscovered band to play a show in your town: offer to book and promote the show for them, especially if they’re already planning a tour in the area. I’ve done that multiple times and it worked out quite well. (Of course, that’s only a good idea if you know what you’re doing.)
The vast majority of bands are not like Justin Bieber. If most bands could even get people to care about them one way or another, they'd probably be happy.
Just wanted to get some feedback on a project I just launched called RoadPony: www.roadpony.com
It's a platform make it easier for performers to book shows in areas where they have the best opportunities for solid attendance and income.
It's also a platform that will allow fans to show performers their interest in the performer and entice them to come to their area to play. The current version is just to gauge interest with lite features.
Artists can create a profile with links, photos, bio, and music. And they can see who favorited their profile and who and where they are requested to play.
Fans can create a profile to favorite and request artists in their city and state at a specific venue.
If there’s enough interest, we’ll build out the campaign element.
Let me know if you have and questions, issues or suggestions!