Fabrice Sergent:
And again, nothing against anybody. I love Taylor Swift and all these large artists, which contribute so much. But the renewal of this cultural fabric is being made by people who are struggling, fighting, who are young enough to create disruptions. And to never be tired by success. Never be satisfied. So that's where culture grow. And we need that. It's vital to our society.

Michael Walker:
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All right, I'm excited to be here today with Fabrice Sergent. So Fabrice is the co-founder and managing partner of Bands in Town Group. So Bands in Town, if you're a musician, you've probably heard of Bands in Town. They're probably, easily the number one live music discovery platform. They have over 70 million registered music fans and over 550,000 music artists. And basically their platform helps to connect artists with their fans, specifically, as it relates to live events. And so you've probably seen their widgets on a lot of different websites that are hosted where if you're looking to figure out easily who are the artists that are coming nearby that are going to be performing near you and get notified when they're playing nearby, then Bands in Town basically helps to connect the dots. Bands in Town is named Varieties 10 tech innovators to watch. It's one of fast companies, world's most innovative companies. So pretty amazing things in the music industry and it really helped to serve artists and fans together and bring people together. So Fabrice, thank you so much for taking the time to be here today.

Fabrice Sergent:
Likewise. It's a pleasure to be back.

Michael Walker:
Absolutely. So to get started, for anyone who hasn't met you before, hasn't connected with Bands in Town, I'd love to hear a little bit about your story and how you founded Bands in Town and how it grew to becoming the platform that it is today.

Fabrice Sergent:
Well, my partner and I, Julian, were publishing apps. And way beyond music, but at the core, we are live music fans. And we love underground electronic music, and that's why we bonded so much. We are looking for a guide to find shows in the US, especially who are coming from Europe, as you may hear. We couldn't find and track artists and DJs when they were traveling from Germany or France. And we found this Facebook app actually, which was preexisting on Facebook, enabling artists to post job ads. We offered the team, and we bought actually this app. And through organic growth and acquisitions, we built the previous scalable platforms to help both artists stay in touch with their fans and be engaged with their fans. Fans never miss a show, and brands and advertisers to be able to engage with music fans at scale.

Michael Walker:
Very cool. Yeah, well one thing that I saw when I was digging into Bands in Town, that's more recent thing, I think it might be early access or it's getting ready to be released right now, is a platform around advertising and around discovery. So that might be something for us to dig into together. But I guess before we dive in, I'd be curious to hear, you have over 550,000 artists now and 70 million registered music fans. I'm looking at the scope of the music industry right now. What do you see as one of the biggest, the most common challenges that musicians are struggling with when they first come to you? What do you think are some of the biggest challenges they're facing right now?

Fabrice Sergent:
Well, actually, we reached, we're up to 75 million registered users. That's very fast. And yes, pretty much 97% of Billboard top 200 artists as well as 70% of all artists on tour in the world are using Bands in Town or created an account on Bands in Town for artists. So indeed, we have a pretty good observation of the way and the challenge that they face. So the first challenge, I guess, was to go back to live in the period when people didn't know exactly whether it would really restart or Covid would come back. And even though the second half of 2021 was already growing fast pace, we saw flurry of tour announcements. Everybody wanted to go out for early 2022. Which created, yes, some of these challenges. So I guess the first hurdle was to get out of the door and on shows.
The second was to overcome Covid and cancellations because some members of the team may have contracted Covid at some point. And so we saw twice as many cancellations in the first half of 2022, twice as many as compared to 2019. So that was pretty significant. And then the third level of challenge was to indeed coup with both the situation and the level of difficulty, sometimes the difficulty to find venues because they were overbooked. So it created a lot of pressure on the teams, on the artists and I think that we never saw so many and so much health issues among the artist community. Now, obviously, the challenge was worth it because 2022 was a record year in turbo ticket sales. And the level of demand was totally unprecedented in face of this level of offer, which was also very high.

Michael Walker:
Right. It definitely seemed like a bit of a slingshot. It was like, we're pulling back the slingshot. We weren't able to go tour it. Everyone really wanted to. So when it opened back up, it was like, whoosh. One thing, we talked really briefly backstage about some current events, current news that are happening. So I'd be curious to hear your thoughts about... You were talking about Taylor Swift and some of this recent news cycle. It sounds like there might be something worth discussing there.

Fabrice Sergent:
Well, so for those who don't know, Taylor Swift announced the tour, which was created a lot of interest. Fans were not able to see her on tour for years. And so they got overwhelmed when fans tried to register for the presale. Eventually they canceled the on-sale because all the tickets got sold during that presale, leaving probably half of the demands out for what I heard sold 2 million tickets. These are public's data. For more than 4 million people are interested. So that's an amazing achievement for Taylor Swift, her team. And I think that frankly, she deserves it. She's a fantastic artist. She has a very loyal fan base and she is a really sophisticated marketeer. This is well, well deserved. But what I found really overwhelming was this whole debate on whether the ticketing company, in this case, TicketMaster, was able to handle the road because they had technical issues apparently and things like that.
They probably did things to the best of their capacity, but it became a huge debate. Whether they did things right or wrong and whether Taylor did things right or wrong. And they even argues among each other. And it created lots of angst, say right, around this topic. And people wrote a lot about that. And my take on this is that, I'm super happy for her. And I think that 2 million fans going to see her in the US is incredible. Now we spend too much time in this industry discussing how third parties succeed. We spend way too much focus on this top sellers, which concentrates most of their value for sure, in term of tickets sold, 'cause she must have sold at a pretty high price, these tickets. And they concentrate lots of value and that's great for them. But the one who need media attention, the one who need support, are the million artists would love to sell two tickets, if they could.
And that's where there's a complete imbalance because especially politicians apparently wanted to get involved. You got a tweet from AOC on the fact that as a Taylor Swift fan, she was not able to buy a ticket. Oh my God. Oh my God. How ridiculous this is. Because I would've preferred, frankly, more focused on the politicians on the impact of small and developing artist, diversity and culture, and cultural diversity. And I would've preferred support from the polititions and the focus and attention on what needs to be done potentially to help small artists in emerge and grow in the context of a very strong competition from this very large shows, which, they are exciting and I respect and love them a lot.
But they don't need help, no. So we in Bands in Town proud ourselves to help emerging artists being discovered. And we have an algorithm and technology that typically send about 11 million people buying tickets every month. But we pride ourselves because 50% of these people are led to buy tickets for artists of less than a hundred thousand followers on Bands in Town. And that means relatively small and developing artists. And that's what we pride ourselves for. So I have a ton of artists which deserve support honestly. And I think this whole fight between politicians and Taylor Swift and ticketing company is completely irrelevant and frankly really boring, compared to what's relevance to culture right now, which is to help developing artists.

Michael Walker:
Wow. I mean that was really well articulated, I feel like. And as someone has a huge heart for emerging artists and serving that community, I think that's a message that is really important and hopefully is well received here as well. Just from a standpoint of, it's so interesting in the music industry how it's not like this in every industry. But if you're in a band that has moderate success, if you have 30 million streams on Spotify. And you have a full-time career. You could do have a six figure, even seven figure music income.
But if you meet someone and they ask, "What's the name of your band?" And you say the name of your band. And they don't recognize the name, then the first assumption is like, "Oh, they haven't really made it yet. Or they're not really successful yet," because they're not a household name that everybody recognizes. And it's so funny that that's the case in the music industry, that it's almost like this assumption that you need to be at that level of breakthrough artist or be at the top in order to even have made it or be successful. While the truth is, now with the internet and with the ability for independent artists to have a full-time career, you don't necessarily have to be a Taylor Swift in order to have a very healthy, sustainable, awesome, creative passion and a business around it. So I would love to hear about-

Fabrice Sergent:
Yeah. That's very well said by the way. And I think you're absolutely right. It's just as if, in tech, the only people who would deserve attention from an economic standpoint or from a country's GDP standpoint would be the General Motors or Elon Musk of the world, right? Of course, companies' economy is vibrant when there are small businesses that are altogether created enough jobs in enough activity to support the economy. The economy is not supported regardless of what they say by the large corporations or by the top tech companies because these are precisely the one who are killing jobs in general. And while the innovation comes from small businesses. And so this translates very truly in music and culture where indeed, what's matters is not the one who made it, is how the environment support and facilitates the renewal of this cultural fabric. Because otherwise, there's no culture.
Culture is only nourished by the next upcoming artist. I'm sorry to say that, but to me, an artist that succeed that much like, of course, Taylor and the others, they do have an impact on culture. For me, they're already not outdated, but they're past. They're past because their situation, their level of success... And again, nothing against anybody. I love Taylor Swift and all this large artist which contributes so much. But it's the renewal of this cultural fabric is being made by people who are struggling, fighting, who are young enough to create disruptions and to never be tired by success, never be satisfied, never be... So that's where culture grow. And we need that. It's vital to our society. So that's why my anger or I'm annoyed by the lack of focus when I see politician getting involved in trying to support this big artist. It's ironic that a liberal   politicians comes to support what would be equivalent of large corporation. Because it's a large corporation actually in the music scene. We need support for independent venues, for developing artists and that's where that's what matters. It's so vital for society.

Michael Walker:
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100%. Yeah, it's so interesting too, just considering the... When you talk about the cultural impact and the cultural ties between independent artists, there's a certain level of intimacy or an ability to... Yeah, it's almost like... I don't know if you've heard of these circles of influence. But yeah, I've heard as it relates to news cycles that there's a concept called learned helplessness, where basically learned helplessness is when if we're bombarded regularly with news that's so big in scope and somewhere across the world that we never have visited, then when we hear that news, we can't actually take action or do anything to influence that news directly. And so, it creates a sense of learned helplessness where we start to be desensitized to it because it's something that's way out of the scope of what we directly can influence and change. Versus local community and local culture, we're a lot closer to it. And we can actually make a direct impact.
We can dramatically change the impact of things that are closer to our inner circle. And it's interesting, as when you think about that as it relates to artists. Artists like Taylor Swift, if you're in her inner circle and you're at that level, awesome. Cool. Certainly there's a huge impact to be made there. But for 99.9% of the fans, you might not have that type of relationship with Taylor Swift, where you're going to be able to reach out and send her a message and hear back from her and have a conversation back and forth and actually be able to be a part of the artwork or be able to influence or co-create this music together.
Whereas an independent artist, anyone who's listening to this right now, one benefit or one strength that you have versus Taylor Swift or versus a major record label artist is that you have the ability to directly connect and communicate with your fans within level of intimacy that is very difficult to compete with for someone that is super, super successful. Because you can actually have conversations and you can create artwork and get their feedback and get their ideas and create something that's much more connected. I feel like sometimes that's overlooked because we feel like we're at a disadvantage or we don't have a billion fans or a million fans and so it feels like we can't be successful when we do have some strengths.

Fabrice Sergent:
No, of course. When you know you activates such fan base and to indeed engage, that's why we are trying to provide tools in Bands in Town for artists who just released, for example, free  . There's now a MailChimp inside for free that offers to an artist who wants to either upload their own contacts and use the system to send emails or to potentially acquire new contacts because if they use our tools, we let them message the fans. They acquire us through the widget. And when they acquire for smart data, they can message them through the email.
So we look at  what are people sending? We send about a hundred million emails per month now. So what are people doing with this? And to your points, there are some very nice initiatives that grow way beyond the traditional promotion of music around merch, around livestream, around NFT,  there are many things that contributes the artistic ecosystem. And yes, this is a knot that's part of the... That's marketing. But this is building this fan base, the first step without creating fatigue. But also by creating emotion and providing incentives to engage or potentially to buy something.

Michael Walker:
Very cool. No, that's awesome. So MailChimp, being able to send out emails and have a CRM or a contact list for fans, our street team software that we've been developing over the past two and a half years can have two-way SMS communication, two-way email communication. It's basically a contact list as well. You can create funnels and websites on it, and use it for a lot of marketing initiatives. And I would love to connect with you about potentially building an API connection in a similar way to MailChimp to be able to take their street team and be able to integrate it with Bands in Town with their live events. I saw that there's a public API that we could potentially build some events, API integration. But if we were able to import the contacts from an artist, an independent artist street team, into Bands in Town, if you have tools for integrating with that, that could be a cool collaboration to explore.

Fabrice Sergent:
And we are always going to discuss such opportunities because when you're small and developing artists, which is obviously the main candidates are using this type of platforms. When you are much bigger and you have more major revenue, you're in different situation. But you have to save time. And you don't want yet another platform to deal with even though it might be cool and super efficient. But what's usually appreciated is when those platforms actually make you save time instead of wasting. But that's why, we are very integrated by the way. We do integrate. So Bands in Town is integrated with people like Bandzoogle or Wix, Squarespace, World Press, LinkTree. Big integration with LinkTree, which makes things really much... And then when artists publish their, we also get the benefits of our distribution network. Which is essentially, we now surface in Shazam. We just are now starting surface in on Apple Maps, being, we have an agreement with Amazon Alexa. There's a number of outlets that actually can surface date published by the artist once and essentially we surface them everywhere.

Michael Walker:
So cool. Yeah, I'm super excited about that. I think there's a big opportunity for integration that we could build on there. Awesome. We also have a music NFT marketplace that we've built into the software service too. So it might be something for us to connect on. I know currently at the time we're recording this, there's huge scandal around NFTs, with FTX and crypto is just like like tete a tete. So I know that there's big waves that are happening. But the way that we've-

Fabrice Sergent:
I think you shouldn't be apologetic. I think that's great that it's super innovative to offer artists ways to essentially diversify their source of income. At the end of the day, that's what NFT's promise is. You have other things that are incredibly promising through Web3, such as the royalty contracts.
There's a number of potentially DAOs that may be able to invest in rights, recordings. There are many ways, Web3, to become a driving in the music economy. So being a pioneer is incredibly innovative and that's great. I'm a huge innovator. And I think that those ups and down, sorry, are normal in a very nascent market. It's unfortunate that some may take advantage and potentially to fraud or misbehave. And yes, but that also comes with the new world. It's always like that. I usually say, when you play a game, you need to know the rules. If you learn. And yes, and if Web3 and crypto is fairly new and it's very dangerous. But once it's going to mature and once it's going to become consumer friendly, which is not really at the time, in my opinion, then the potential will be enormous.

Michael Walker:
Absolutely. Oh man, I'm so excited. I feel like I want to end this interview a little bit early so we have a little bit more time to be able to walk through some of the stuff that we're building and talk about that. But I guess one thing I'd love to connect on for anyone that's listening right now, really with Bands in Town, you've created such an incredible tool for independent artists to be able to, one, connect with their existing fans, but also it seems like there's been some really huge strides and movements around helping these artists, emerging artists, to be able to be discovered, and for exposure, and being able to help them grow in a holistic way.
So I'd love to hear just a little bit about the current status of Bands in Town and the vision for when it comes to building a holistic platform that empowers artists both on a level that you're well known for, which is the live events and connecting them. But also I'm just curious about your vision and about what's currently available right now and what are you most excited about that you're working on as it relates to helping empower independent artists?

Fabrice Sergent:
Well, so again, with Bands in Town for artists, it really all started with ability just to list their tour dates and publish them through all these networks, right? We expanded that by offering a smart link. So beyond the widgets and the APIs. So that once you list your tour dates, once when artists list their tour dates, they can essentially display them themselves on their own properties as well for free without any effort. This by itself has an impact because once you're well listed and registered, once you created an account on Bands in Town, it triggers, first of all, what we call automation. So we send emails to fans that may follow you or fans that should discover you. So through our recognition engine. And we alert them so that they never miss a show. That by itself, represents a lot of marketing, that artists can tap into just by registering on the platform and by listing the show. Even if they have no follower, we will recommend that to people who don't follow them.
So it's not like yet another platform like Instagram or Facebook, which will ask you to bring the followers and also to potentially pay to reach them once you grow that fan base. On Bands in Town, you can get discovered with no followers as no matter how early you are. The earlier you create your account, the better it is. And you can take advantage of the tools to display your products and stuff. Once you stop building your following, we give you tools to acquire first party data. So sign up for a newsletter or sign up widgets, put on your sites. Even when people to follow you on Bands in Town, the double up teams. So they opt in to follow the artist and they opt to receive emails from Bands in Town from this artist. So that helps the artist create its own email list or phone number list, which we believe is the only way to build sustainable future.
We believe it's critical for artists to own their first party data. Once artists build this audience, and again, we help them do so because we recommend their fans follow them, et cetera. Once that happens, this virtual cycle happens, Bands in Town provides tools to manage this fan base, with insights in a lot of tools to better engage. And lastly, yes, we also provide these tools to engage such fan base and we call this suite of tools from first party data acquisition, fan management and fan engagement, which includes the free email platform. We call that the fan management suite. And we built this because we think that it's really beyond live events. Around live events, live events is the core to an artist economy. It's not a side truck.
And I said that 80% of the artist revenue come from live events. So some may be obsessed by checking their Spotify or Apple Music account. But the reality is that, what really matters is everything that's everything that spawns life. So we build this platform to help artists engage before the tour, during the tour and afterward. So it's really all about the lifecycle, the journey of the artist.

Michael Walker:
Very cool. I mean it's so interesting, just this idea of live events in general and the magic around... Live events in their very nature, they are tangible and there's a scarcity to them. There's a certain moment. There's an event. Even when it comes to the software side of things, starting to dig into how these events happen and how NFTs work. There's a specific timestamp. It's pretty interesting. And in marketing in general, if you make your marketing into an event, it's proven to be much, much more effective just because you have an actual tangible start date and end date and a moment in time. So makes sense that that's been such a... You said over 80% results are coming from live events. And it's going to be really cool to see how that applies to the digital world as well, which seems like that's really a huge movement that the fan management tool is a part of or starting to connect with fans before and after and online.
Cool. Well hey Fabrice, thanks so much for taking the time to come on here and talk about all this stuff. I geek out about this and it's so cool what you guys have built and what you're continuing to innovate. And I appreciate the focus as well on really helping to empower independent artists and helping to... You bring these cultural gold mines of artists and creators. Being able to help empower them, to be able to keep creating and be able to connect with their fans is pretty noble work. So appreciate what you're doing. And for anyone who's listening or watching this right now who maybe they haven't created a Bands in Town account yet or they want to get started, where can they go to learn more and to get started?

Fabrice Sergent:
Yeah. It's artist.bandsintown.com. There's a lot of material online, including a tutorial. So that's pretty easy to discover.

Michael Walker:
Very cool.

Fabrice Sergent:
Thank you so much for having us. I appreciate you as well. I think that's what you're doing around and for artists with your own artist's background is incredibly powerful because providing tools and stuff matters. But educating artists and teams how to use that is as important. Not more, because they don't have the time to look through the clutter of environments in which they evolve. So thank you. Thank you for what you do.

Michael Walker:
Yeah, I appreciate that. Yeah. It is interesting you bring up that point, like the education and the tools. 'Cause you need both to be successful. It's almost like, if you're going to build a house, you need the proper tools to build a house. If you don't have a hammer and you don't have these tools, if you're trying to do it with your hands, then good luck. But also, you need blueprints. You need the-

Fabrice Sergent:
To our audience, it's great that you are trying to learn. So in other words, I know how hard it is to do everything at the same time, to create music, to tour, to market, to do storytelling on Instagram and whatever. So all of that is a lot for the same person or even the same team, and trying to learn and improve skills and walk the walk, in a way, is even more impressive. So you'll get rewarded.

Michael Walker:
Awesome. Cool. Well thank you again. It's been great connecting. And like always, for anyone who's listening or watching us right now, all the links and whatnot are going to be in the show notes for easy access. And we'll talk to you again soon.

Fabrice Sergent:
Thank You. Bye-bye.

Michael Walker:
Hey, it's Michael here. I hope that you got a ton of value out of this episode. Make sure to check out the show notes to learn more about our guests today. And if you want to support the podcast, then there's a few ways to help us grow. First, if you hit subscribe, then I'll make sure you don't miss a new episode. Secondly, if you share it with your friends or on your social media, tag us. That really helps us out. And third, best of all, if you leave us an honest review, it's going to help us reach more musicians like you who want to take their music career to the next level. The time to be a modern musician is now. And I look forward to seeing you on our next episode.