[corkinn]

Hey all,

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!

[hnruss]

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.

[corkinn]

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.

Open to any thoughts on this!

[hnruss]

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.

[amiKY]

Hi Corkinn,

I really liked the look of your website.

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.

Best wishes

[corkinn]

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!

[amiKY]

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.

[corkinn]

This is all great insight. Thank you so much!

[mtalantikite]

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!

[Agentlien]

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.

[corkinn]

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.

Also, the wish list idea is great!

[tacosaretasty]

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!

[corkinn]

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!

[Spivak]

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?

[issa]

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.

[boomboomsubban]

It says

>When the time comes, you and all other bidders can attend the show

Which I think implies anyone in the bid gets a ticket? I have no idea how you would get multiple ticket's though.

[corkinn]

The current plan is to make the lowest bid amount the price to entry. So you'd be guaranteed a ticket if you placed that bid.

[adzm]

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.

[corkinn]

Correct. The current plan is that the money would not be removed from your account or wherever until the city was confirmed by the band.

If you have any ideas that would make users who are pledging more comfortable with putting up the funds, I'd be interested in hearing them!

[heleninboodler]

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.

[corkinn]

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.

[heleninboodler]

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.

[bluetwo]

Not to be mean but having a nice page with a "sign up for updates" box isn't "launching". It is step 1 of most "startup" essays.

[xwdv]

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.

[bigiain]

> A lot of bands are basically T-Shirt companies

It works that way for Harley Davidson too... ;-)

[quicon]

I love the idea. I can only register if I am in USA?

[corkinn]

Thank you! Yes, currently it's limited to USA for registration. We plan to expand this soon!