How Songkick Tourbox increases your event and venue awareness
Why do we blog this? Our experience shows that there is a direct correlation between event awareness and ticket sales. The success of your venue/event is paramount to us and we feel it is our duty to bring new tools to your attention.
There are myriad tools available to raise awareness of your venue or event, and we've written about some of them before. One well known tool, Songkick, just released a new feature called “Tourbox” that brings a music performance you have booked to the attention of would be ticket buyers.
What is Songkick?
The New York Times recently described Songkick as:
[A service] dedicated to the idea of making the concert-going process as easy as looking up a restaurant on Yelp, and its links for concert dates and tickets now pop up on YouTube, Vevo, MTV and various other sites around the Web.
The scope of Songkick's contribution to event awareness should not be underestimated:
The average fan using Songkick goes to twice as many shows the year after they start using us, and we’re proud to say that we’re now the second largest concert site in the world after Ticketmaster with almost six million monthly users who find out who find out about concerts every month on the web, and through our iPhone and Spotify apps.
Up until now, the London based Songkick service has been focused on increasing event awareness through integration at a business-to-business ( B2B ) level with established partners MTV, YouTube, Billboard, and Last.fm. The B2B integration excluded the artist's direct participation, and often, the venue ( that’s your venue ) as well.
The new Tourbox feature allows the artists themselves to contribute to event awareness efforts by adding the same prompt to buy tickets seen on the big distribution channels to be on the artist's website or Facebook page.
How Tourbox works
Songkick describes how Tourbox works:
Simply enter your tour dates, once, and we publish them everywhere. Automagically they hit Songkick, Spotify, SoundCloud and YouTube as well as on an artist’s website, Facebook and Tumblr.
Once Tourbox is enabled by an artist you have booked to perform, sophisticated geolocation is used when music fans visit partner websites. Then, when someone who lives nearby your venue is listening to the artist's work on Youtube, for example, they are shown the name of your venue at the bottom right corner of the video, which looks like this:
Clicking on your venue name will display the date and time of your booking as well as a link to buy tickets - but only if you have claimed your venue on Songkick.
You should take the time to claim your venue on websites like foursquare and Yelp because control of how the public perceives your business is, obviously, very important. Songkick venue listings are machine generated ( using public location data ) eliminating the need for explicit permission for your venue to be displayed. As such, the same encouragement applies to Songkick too. We have a standing offer to our existing customers to help claim your venue on foursquare and Yelp, and now expand that offer to include Songkick.
With the addition of Tourbox, Songkick is quickly becoming an additional tool in your "wrangler's" toolkit box.
Event awareness in a team effort. Together, “we” ( Thundertix, you and the artists you have booked ) can increase the number and velocity of tickets sales.
What do you think? Do you want the artists you have booked to promote their performance independently using Songkick’s Tourbox? Let us know in the comments below!
