Concert discovery platform Bandsintown is giving venues and festivals more control when it comes to alerting fans of new events. The popular startup -- 38 million-plus registered users -- said on Monday that venues can now use Bandsintown Manager to claim and customize their own brand profiles, and more importantly, create and publish events independently.
Until now, promoters, venues and festivals have been able to use Bandsintown's promoters service to create campaigns, leaving it up to the service and artists to send alerts to potential concertgoers. The tweak to give venues a more hands-on utility was a common ask from owners and promoters, the company said.
Jon Ostrow, vp of sales and business development, said over 500 venues have already signed up for the beta version of the expanded Manager platform, ahead of a wide release on Dec. 15.
This is the second significant update to the app in recent months. In July, the firm gave registered artists the ability to manage their own pages in order to set status updates informing fans of new music, tour dates or other news.
"That idea came out of meetings with management companies," co-managing partner Julien Mitelberg told Billboard recently. "They said, 'I have 200,000 fans tracking this act. How can I talk to them?' We said, 'We'll send them tour dates,' and they said, 'If they RSVP to the show, I want to connect with them, talk to them, tell them they have 10 percent off at the merch table.'"
Bandsintown also likes to stress that it doesn't link to "secondary ticketing" sites like StubHub... unless acts approve.
"We contribute value to the artists and we extract value from the industry -- promoters and ticketing companies," co-managing partner Fabrice Sergent said. "We made a choice to follow the guidance of artists when it comes to primary ticketing; if a show is sold out, we'll suggest a secondary alternative, but only if it's OK with the artist."