The dust has barely settled since we reported about Floob’s ending up in the deadpool on Jan 21st. Now the founding team, Kai Lemmetty and Joonas Pekkanen, is at it again and this times its music gigs they are after.
The new startup is called GigsWiz and is founded by Lemmetty, Pekkanen and Juuso Vermasheinä who has a background in game retail business.
Lemmetty was responsible for product development and business development in the music industry at Floobs Ltd and had previously seen some of the problems in the industry and together with Pekkanen they had some ideas how to help the music industry build a better business. Vermasheinä had started the company already in the summer of 2009 but after meeting with Lemmetty and Pekkanen the three decided to start working together on a slightly different business plan. In addition to the core management team GigsWiz is building an advisory board including music industry specialists, crowdsourcing and ‘intention broadcasting experts’, which should hint on the area the company focuses on.
GigsWiz is developing a set of statistics and analytics tools for the live music industry. We all know how the Internet has been killing the music industry’s business for a while now. Recorded music sales are sinking (down 9% in 2008 and more than 20% during 2003-2008). The trend is unstoppable and many record labels would be screaming for help if they had any voice left. While recorded music revenues diminish there has been clear signs of growing revenues in the concert industry. Concert revenues have grown 10% to 20% each year between 2003-2008.
Pekkanen tells me that “There are two constraining factors in the concert industry; time and space. It is not possible to have one artist in two places at the same time and it takes time to move from venue to another. The venues that host the concerts have a limited space for audience. Due to these factors it will be more important to acquire better data about where and when to organize events in the future. Until now the bands and their support organizations (these include, but are not limited to: promoters, agencies, record labels) have made their critical decisions on where to hold their concerts mainly based on the data they get on record sales, music downloads, mailing lists and previous touring history. This is evidently problematic and ineffective way to operate.”
GigsWiz is still in stealth mode, but it not hard to guess that the guys are trying to help the artists to co-ordinate and monetize the concerts better. Currently the team is developing the backend and started doing some preliminary pilot testing with a few bands. Lemmetty tells me that we can expect Beta release “soon”.
