Gigswiz, a Finnish startup founded by Juuso Vermasheinä with the ex-Floobs duo Kai Lemmetty and Joonas Pekkanen, has just launched in Beta. The service aims to enable bands and artists to better tell where they have fans who’d be willing to come and see them play. The team hasn’t wasted any time as the beta launch came just months after they started to work on the idea in this February.
The service is an analytics platform for the live music industry and it should help bands, their agents and local promoters make better informed decisions on where bands should arrange concerts and tours. GigsWiz gathers fan requests through widgets that sit on the bands’ web sites and is looking to combine it with real-time consumption data from online music services. The actual widget can sit on the band’s web pages, MySpace pages and Facebook pages.
Many have argued that most of the revenue that bands make comes increasingly from the concert tickets and the swag they sell at the concerts. GigsWiz figured that with their service the bands could serve their own fans better and improve their revenue by optimizing gigs and tours to the right cities and venues. Rasmus, a popular Finnish band (Spotify link here), is among the first bands using GigsWiz.
I remember some years ago a tech savvy artist Jonathan Coulton (Spotify link here) did used a similar model rather successfully with his fans, albeit in very small scale, to find the people who enjoyed his music the most so he knew where to play. A smart model and could be especially valuable when mixed with other third party location based data from services like Spotify.
The GigsWiz service is free of charge for bands and artists. Even though the company hasn’t said anything about it, I don’t think a clear revenue model is far off if Gigswiz wants to build it in the service, especially if in the future most of the money comes from concert tickets and the swag anyway. That said, another potentially interesting model would be to focus on the data game and try to capture international markets with the model instead of diverting resources and attention to milking euros from the ticket sales.
