Fabrice Sergent: Our mission, we think we are on a mission to expose and help artists expose and surface their tour dates everywhere. That's what I call the BandsInTown Everywhere, Everywhere mission. You publish once, it gets everywhere. So the way we work with Spotify is that if an artist sets up a tool that's on BandsInTown, it's going to go to the right artist page on Spotify. Because part of what BandsInTown brings to the table for this platform is a better artist name matching technology. We help artists verify, but we also help sync the right events with the right artist page across these platforms. 

Michael Walker: It's easy to get lost in today's music industry with constantly changing technology and where anyone with a computer can release their own music. I'm going to share with you why this is the best time to be an independent musician and it's only getting better. If you have high-quality music, but you just don't know the best way to promote yourself so that you can reach the right people and generate a sustainable income with your music, we're going to show you the best strategies that we're using right now to reach millions of new listeners every month without spending 10 hours a day on social media. We're creating a revolution in today's music industry and this is your invitation to join me. I'm your host, Michael Walker.

So I'm super excited to be here today with Fabrice Sergent. Fabrice, the last time we connected was at a Paradise Fears show and you came out and I remember our band was really excited. We're like: wow, like the CEO of BandsInTown is coming to see Paradise Fears play and we're a humble independent band, but it was a fun show. It was a sold out crowd of, I don't know, 300-400 cap room. And it was really special connecting there. But yeah, for anyone who hasn't met Fabrice or this is the first time connecting. Fabrice is the co-founder and managing partner of the company BandsInTown. And if you're a musician, then you've probably heard of BandsInTown. It's like the number one app in the world for fans to be able to follow and connect with artists and their shows. And they have over 70 million registered music fans, over 550,000 artists on the platform. They reach 250 million monthly unique fans. And they were named as fast company’s “world's most innovative companies”. So that's the real deal. And specifically for helping artists to be able to connect with their fans through live experiences. We had a Fabrice on our podcast a couple of years ago, and I remember having a great conversation just about the value of live experience with music. Now more than ever, the ability for artists to connect with their fans through those live experiences seems like such the root of music itself. So I'm excited to have him back on the podcast today to connect more. And they also have just announced a big new integration with Spotify and some revolutionary new things for live music discovery as well. So Fabrice, thank you so much for taking the time to be back here today.

Fabrice Sergent: Michael, I'm so happy to be back here and to be with you today.

Michael: Awesome. Maybe we just jump right into it. I would love to hear you from your perspective, maybe to start with, in today's day and age with digital avenues for artists to be able to release music and social media and connect with their fans and at the same time, the connection in a lot of ways, we're more connected than ever, but we're also less connected than ever. I'd love to hear you just speak about, from your experience, the importance of live music and what do you see as the role of live music right now in today's day and age for a musician?

Fabrice:  Actually we have actually 85 million registered users. And the reason why I'm saying this is because you might have been reading something that dates back a year before. What I'm trying to say is that there's never been so much excitement and demand for live shows and live music, which helped us grow organically. There was no advertising as usual. BandsInTown never advertised. From 70 something to 85 million within a year.

Michael: Wow!

Fabrice: And so, it's unprecedented. It's by far the fastest and the most important we’ve ever experienced. And I think that there's a reason for that. It's because people really felt that live music post-pandemic or during the pandemic was essential to their life. But it was truly what we were advocating, which was one of the last tribal experiences, like a moment of communion. You cheer all together in the moshpit, sharing the germs for the artist and for the talent. And where there's no gender, sexual orientation, income, inequalities, whatever, we're all here in the moshpit equal and being very much human in this moment for the artist and for the music. So this moment of joy is irreplaceable. It's something that became palpable actually to most fans. Of course, artists know that and believe so. You might say that, BandsInTown, we live for live music. So that's also pretty natural to us, but for the fans, some of them… a lot of them are just casual fans. They may not go to shows as often as we think they go. So that pandemic, which was so terrible and so difficult as a moment for all of us, turned out to be an awakening for a lot of these fans.

Michael: Yeah. Yeah. It's been super interesting to see what's happened with live music as the pandemic ended and that pent up demand just exploded. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on the future of live music and some of the things that you described around the communal aspect of being together and in that experience, swapping germs, for example, [chuckles] is an interesting way of putting it, but it's, so true. It also seems like we're entering an era of spatial computing, with the vision pro that just got released. In particular, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on if you have any predictions on where live music is going and is there a role or a place for digital live experiences. Is that something you think is going to be happening here in the next couple of years? And how might we best align with that as independent artists to catch that wave?

Fabrice: Yeah, I'm still convinced that virtual and digital will explode at some point soon and would be complementary to the live experience. There are a lot of people who just can't go to live show. They are too far from the venue. They potentially have issues going physically in person to the venues because they might have anxiety; they may not like the crowd, et cetera. And it is expensive, right? There's no question that those ticket prices increased, for good reason, but that's a fact. So having a personal experience with it should always be an option. Livestreams were big during the pandemic. I think it's played its role, an important one. And then people said: Oh, it's dead because nobody wants to watch this livestream anymore. When you know technology, you learn how to learn through the weak signal. And what I saw during the pandemic is an incredible appetite and a lot of creative opportunities that were given to the artist to create stuff that in fact may not be even possible in physical lives, which means that there's incrementalities there. And so on the fun side, yes, of course, they didn't want to watch livestream at the end of the pandemic for the reason I described actually, but that doesn't mean that this is not going to come back. These things keep changing and I can see indeed through the new headsets, even though they are still very expensive, it's going to take time for them to go down. But yes, through the new headsets, through new experiences, those kind of things become more common in general in the journey of the artist. Adding a live stream is pretty natural, should be pretty natural as part of a tour. Now, the future of live music is not only that, I think it's also to expand geographically, because it's more and more common for artists to tour outside of their original country, internationally in, in geographies that it was simply just not possible before. Finding audience and fans through social media. It's also important to note that I think this is the time when indie artists are more important than ever not, only because they foster diversity in culture, and they also support the entire creativity in this industry, but also because there, there will be more artists on tour doing more shows also because there are more venues. So this is also an important trend. The time of indie artists on tour is definitely come much more strongly than it was before.

Michael: Yeah it's definitely a good time to be an indie musician. Good time to be a part of this community together. Awesome. So yeah, I know that you've recently announced an integration with Spotify. And I'd love to hear you share a little bit about the details behind how that integration works and as an indie artist, how can they best leverage that.

Fabrice: Yeah, of course. Look, we have brands that are very compatible, first and foremost, both brands support artist discovery and music discovery, are definitely pro-artists in their approach to everything. I would, at least I can speak for BandsInTown very strongly. And so part of our mission, we think we are on a mission to expose and help artists expose and surface their tour dates everywhere. That's what I call the BandsInTown Everywhere, Everywhere mission. You publish once, it gets everywhere. I think that by the end of this year, we have grown or expanded our audience from let's say a hundred million users up to billion integration with Spotify, integration with Apple two years ago and many others, Microsoft and many platforms that we connect with. So all these platforms, they don't have an artist platform per se that enables them to update tour dates. We do have that. 600,000 artists created an account on BandsInTown and have full control of their tour dates. They can publish, upload, schedule the publishing of a tour date, and obviously they can use our tools to promote their tour dates on their site, on their social media and everything. We take care of the rest. We take care of the rest. We will expose them everywhere. So the way we work with Spotify is that if an artist set up tour dates on BandsInTown, it's going to go to the right artist page on Spotify. In order to do artists have to make sure that they, of course, create an account on BenzBandsInTown, but also add their Spotify links to their accounts and as much metadata, we call it metadata, which means bio, genre, everything, so that they increase the chance to match their profile with the right artist profile on these platforms. Because part of what BandsInTown brings to the table for this platform is a better artist name-matching technology. We help artists verify, but we also help sync the right events with the right artist page across these platforms.

Michael: Amazing. And for anyone who, again, if you're a musician, then you've probably heard of BandsInTown, and if you haven't, then you should immediately go download it and get on there and follow all of your favorite bands. As an artist, I assume that a membership or an account costs, what, 2 or 3 thousand dollars a month for BandsInTown? Or how much does it cost? [both laughing]

Fabrice: Are you kidding me?

Michael: Just kidding. Yeah. So the punchline is that you can sign up as an artist completely for free. Is that right?

Fabrice: I was wondering if Michael was joking, so yes, exactly. It's free. This is our mission. You can create an account. List your tour dates, have full control, and also use our tools to display such tour dates on your website, on your socials. Doing so, your artists also can collect first party data. So we believe that in order to build a sustainable future, it's important for artists to be able to own their data. So we allow them to message all their fans on BandsInTown, and we allow them to download all their followers that they had creates through the tools, take a position on their websites or their social media. So there are a lot of benefits, and as I said, we take care of the rest.

Michael: That's absolutely amazing. So you actually have the ability to communicate directly with your fans who follow you on BandsInTown as well. And you said you can export an email list of your followers on BandsInTown.

Fabrice: Yes, you can do that too, provided you help us acquire them. So in other words, you can export to your other platforms. Is that what you mean?

Michael: Yeah, that's what I'm curious about. We have a platform called StreetTeam that's like a CRM platform for sending out automated email campaigns or text message campaigns. And so I was just curious how it might integrate with BandsInTown. If there's like a way that even maybe on the backend, we could have like an API integration where it syncs up their followers between BandsInTown and their account.

Fabrice: There is no API integration, but definitely each artist can log into its accounts. And for each follower that they had acquired, not all the followers, because the follower needs to give permission for that, right? The follower needs to authorize the artist to contact them. And they do so when they land on the artist's websites, they see an opt in flow that requires them to authorize the artist to contact them. Yes, in that case they can certainly utilize such data on other platforms for sure.

Michael: Awesome. Is there any sort of other direction integration that we could do with our platform where if there's a fan that has purchased a t-shirt from them and we know their contact information and their address, is there a way to sync that up with BandsInTown?

Fabrice: You can do the opposite. Yes. You can upload contacts on BandsInTown, for sure, but we are not like a full CRM platform. What we have is to collect first party data from the artist's properties and potentially message them. And then if the artist wants to use such data on a CRM platform, they can export them to the platform of their choice.

Michael: Awesome. All right. So we do have a live audience that's here today. So speaking of live and the connection element. So I would love to open up the floor to anyone here who would like to connect with Fabrice and has any questions. So if you would like to come on stage, you can raise your hand and ask a question. Otherwise, feel free to put them in the chat as well. If you wanted to ask a question. I'm happy to forward it for you.

I see Jared Arkaik. Jared's a member of our team. He said: I use BandsInTown for all my tours. Did he say you can download the fan data? Yes. That's what he said. As long as they've opted-in for that authorization. Lots of people saying that they love BandsInTown. Yep. Definitely understand that. I see VoZ requested to speak so we can bring on VoZ.

Hey VoZ, how are you doing today?

VoZ: I'm doing good. Hello, Fabrice.

Fabrice: Hello.

VoZ: Nice hearing you and thank-you for the wonderful, wonderful technology that you've created and hope you can work something in with Modern Musician and help all of the current musicians be able to utilize your service. I went online while you were talking and perused it. I’m here in Tupelo, Mississippi and it immediately brought up lots of venues in Oxford, Mississippi and close by. It's a wonderful, wonder tool! And I just I would just want to applaud your efforts and I wish you the best of all things in your pursuits.

Fabrice: You made my day! It's so good to hear such feedback. I’ll share with the team for sure. It's so important for us to get good, and also sometimes challenging feedback to improve, but we like to co-build. We like to do stuff with the actual player and hopefully we do it well. VoZ: You're doing it well. I wish you the best of all things in life. By the way, where are you from originally? France?

Fabrice: Oh yeah. I'm French originally. I've been in the US for 20 years, but I can't hide it. [chuckles]

Voz: Once again, thank you. Thank you, Michael.

Michael: Thanks, Voz!

Fabrice: Thank you for coming.

Michael: That's nice when you have someone come on stage and just share appreciation. Yeah. And well deserved. Yeah. You have to completely changed the world for so many musicians.

Fabrice: It’s nice having such an expert saying this. That means a lot to me. [both chuckle] Michael: Extremely humble as well.

Fabrice: And an artist on top of that.

Michael: Thanks. Cool. I see a question here from Tercio Pello. I was actually a little bit curious about this as well in terms of just Tercio Pello as a structure. Tercio Pello asks: how does BandsInTown make money as a business if it's not through charging artists for subscription?

Fabrice: Yeah. Yeah. We sell campaigns and advertising to brands and to event organizers. So precisely, to give you an example, we launched a new offer to venues, which they can now subscribe to a monthly subscription. What we offer them is marketing automation for all of their shows. They get a full dashboard control over their venue page. They can choose their “hero image”. They can delete shows themselves. And they get a marketing system that touches 5x during the life cycle of a show: on sale, pre-sale, on sale months before, a week before… and also the communicator is RSVP with news and reminders to buy the tickets for every single show of the venue. So that's an example of a subscription we sell to venues. We sell campaigns, a la carte advertising campaigns to promoters, mostly email as well, but also banners and more classic advertising. So that's how we make money. We're not a ticketing company. We're not doing ticketing. We only feature primary ticketing companies. So that's our way also to be respectful of the artist. And we consider that we contribute value to the artists and we are in a partnership with the artists and the way we benefit from this partnership is also because the artists typically recommend BandsInTown. And there's a reason why BandsInTown is such a loved brand among fans and artists. It's because artists are actually supported, have been the most incredible supporter of BandsInTown for the last 10 years. Again we went from 0 - 85 million registered users without paying a single dime of advertising. So that tells a lot about the story and the partnership we have with the artists in general.

Michael: That's incredible. Yeah. It sounds like a total win-win all around. So essentially, venues can get people out to the shows. And so that's a big win for the artists.

Fabricec: Yeah, so there are a lot of brands who want to communicate with music fans because they are engaged and they are passionate. We chose this advertising-based business model. And I think that it makes sense in the overall ecosystem to offer and build new advertising opportunities for these players, because we are, we, just to tell you something. There are 50% more shows in 2024 than it was the case in 2022. So it tells you how competitive this market is. When I say it's a great time to be on tour, it's good, it's the time of the indie artist, yes, but there are a lot of competition. At the end of the day, we also benefit from that side, by selling ads and feature placements.

Michael: Got it. Totally makes sense. So I mean that actually brings up a good question as well. I think it that would be valuable for our community would be to get your perspective in the current landscape when there are more shows than ever and there's also more demand than ever for good reason. Have you seen anything in particular that's like creative ways that artists are using in-person experiences or someone that's looking to distinguish themselves and they want to do shows, but they want to do something that's special or something that cuts through the noise. Have you seen any interesting examples of shows that someone's doing right now and how could an indie artist brainstorm and strategize how they can do something special for their fans related to their live shows?

Fabrice: It's hard to understand this question. I see artists doing systematic meet-and-greets before the show outside of the venue, for example. I see others that will try to message the fans right before the show about a special merch opportunity that's only going to be available at the venue, but that would be a total surprise and for real, like something that has value for this artist. Each initiative is also, I think, impactful if it matches the profile of the artist and if there's an alignment between who the artist is, the brand, and the initiative, and if it feels authentic and genuine. So let's say, you ask all your RSVPs, in BandsInTown, you can message for free people RSVPing to the show, which I think is an incredible feature, frankly. You may message them and say: Hey, come all dressed in white. If you're like a rock band that is always dressed in black and whatever… The point is you have to make it symbiotic with what you want to create as an experience, right? So as long as it's authentic and genuine, then the impact can be really significant.

Michael: Awesome. Yeah. So it sounds like the base principle that's always been there is about connecting with your fans and doing things that are special, that help you to interact with them. And so it's the specifics that are going to look different based on who you are and your unique artist identity. But if you lean into some of those things that you're passionate about that your fans are passionate about and use a platform like BandsInTown, to communicate with them, they can you can actually do things that are creative through that communication channel and do something special or unique, or something that sort of creates like an “in crowd” or creates like an insider club for people who actually attend the live show.

Fabrice: I was at this festival in Miami recently which was organized by the Swiss natural jazz festival, and they had an addition in Miami: John Batiste. So Will Smith's in the crowd and he jumped off stage and started to walk with his foot in the crowd with his musicians toward him and started gave him a mic and started like almost a jam real-time like that totally unexpected and unscripted. You know that, that was mind blowing because he took the initiative, obviously in such a setup, it's quite exceptional, but that was very organic. It didn't feel scripted, right? It was not scripted. And so fans went crazy, right? They felt the connection. If you had like a barometer of artist-to-fan connection during evening at that moment of time, it peaked because they felt close to him. They could literally dance around this encounter and that's magic, right? And I don't know. It's not a given. You may not be able to do that all the time, of course.

Michael: [laughs] Bring my keyboard out to like into the crowd. Maybe if I had a keytar! There you go!

Fabrice: Yeah. That's why each situation is different. But having in mind that fans' connection is key and it's also, it feels so good anyway. It's not dangerous. It's just great.

Michael: Yeah!

Fabrice: So find the creativity to engage in a way that is very unique and special to your own band.

Michael: Super interesting. Yeah. What that reminded me of was one of the little bits that we did when we were touring full-time, and this was just always a special experience, but it was also like a very small thing, but it just made a big impact, was we had one of our songs where there's a section in the song that has some o's in it. [singing] So it's o-o-o. And we did a bit of a crowd participation thing where like they were singing the o's we were singing the o's, but then without them realizing it. We held up the microphone to one of them and I clicked “record” on one of their voices. And then we basically sampled it and we played the Oos back and we did things like the instrumentation. And that was something that was relatively straightforward to do, but it made a huge impact in terms of: that was like a highlight of the show. And I think it comes back to the root of what you're describing there around fan connection and interaction and creating those moments of strong connection.

Fabrice: Yeah. Also, fans don't understand that the concert is very scripted. They don't perceive this, and that's good. They don't understand that every song is prepared, rehearsed and the dancing, the singing, everything is so rightfully prepared. But they feel, intuitively, when it goes off the grid, they feel that something special is happening when it's not completely scripted. It's hard because you can't do that every night ‘cuz then it becomes part of the show, but definitely having this freedom, I think it's important. Keeping this freedom. It's important.

Michael: Yeah. It's interesting. What comes to mind is I've seen some viral comedians blowing up that do interactive things with the audience where they'll do bits for, they'll literally just go back and forth with all the members in the audience. And it seems in some of those cases they're entertaining because you don't know what's going to happen and it could be crazy, but there is like a level of… there's a framework around it though, at the same time. So you're going to do something that you've never done before, but it's still you can kind of archetype and use it as a connection opportunity. Yeah

Fabrice: Yeah. Definitely. Yeah.

Michael: A little bit like when we do these podcasts and we have our live guests come on and ask a question. You never know. You never know. VoZ might say something really mean about BandsInTown. [both chuckle] I'm sure he wouldn't.

Fabrice: That's fine. That's fine. Just bring it on. An artist knows how difficult it is to deliver perfection. And I admire them for that because that's almost like a necessary condition for success, right? You feel that if you fail in delivering the show, people will notice and won’t understand and so they will not be very tolerant. So they know the difficulty. When we build the platform, we're not artists, but it's the same thing. It's super difficult to do everything well and perfectly and for benefits and address all stakeholders. Being an entrepreneur is hard, but having that mindset that you're serving a purpose that's so important that is so critical like live music and artist expression. It fuels the entire company, but it's a challenge. And I don't think we do everything well. We just we f*** up things obviously. However, if people understand and give us at least benefits of the doubt and try to help us and share feedback... Feedback is a gift. We take them very seriously and we try to address them. Yeah.

Michael: I appreciate that. And it's very clear just in the way that you show up and what you've built, like the heart that you have for musicians and the service that you've built. I'm personally very grateful for you and BandsInTown. And I know our whole community is in the chat right now saying, “thank-you”. Trisha goes: thank-you for your service. Fabrice, you're a humanitarian in the truest sense. Everyone loves your creation. I'm grateful for this podcast. Very special service.

Yeah. It's pretty awesome for me to be able to have this experience where I get to connect with people like Fabrice and see the patterns behind some of the most successful people that I've met in this industry. And it seems like all of them are like you, Fabrice, in that what drives them is generally a sense of service; a sense of wanting to contribute and provide value, and also they're very ambitious and driven, but they're humble and they're open and willing to receive feedback, but it's all done for the greater service of their purpose and their mission. And they have clarity around that. So yeah, I just wanted to say once again, thank you Fabrice for coming on here live to share some of the updates in terms of what you're building with BandsInTown. And congratulations on the past year. Obviously there's a huge need for live music overall. There's always been, but in particular right now, because of the pandemic and whatnot I think it's more important than ever for us to connect as humans. So thanks for being a part of that.

Fabrice: Thanks for having us. Thanks for your kind words. I'm not a one-man band. I have a big band behind me together as a team. That's what makes it so exciting and hopefully what makes it so successful that they all share the same vision and the same purpose and the same ambition. So yeah, thank-you for your kind words and support. Appreciate it.

Michael: Awesome. Real quick for anyone that hasn't done this yet, throughout the conversation, or if you haven't signed up for a BandsInTown account, what's the best place for people to go to sign up for a free account?

Fabrice: Yeah. Go to artists that artists.BandsInTown.com. That's where you claim your account and there's an artist verification process, but that's where you can claim your accounts and yes, I encourage you to do it, of course.

Michael: All right. Let's do a virtual round of applause for Fabrice for being here live and we’ll wrap up. YEEAAHHH

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