As you know, Tapped has a mobile app on the Apple Store and Play Store made for performers to get accurate information on venues and quickly send mass emails out to get booked for a show; that’s our initial product. However, I think fewer people know what else we’re building, what we’re building towards, and what the long term vision is. The primary focus of Tapped is to speed up live music’s move from a monopolistic, gate-kept space to one more diverse and well connected (proprietary vs open standards) which we believe to be the only way for the industry and market to grow further.
Crucial to making that happen is proper data on everything that’s going on which is why we focus so hard on collecting it, creating one of the largest (open) live music datasets, and trying to make sense of it. We do this all while still providing actionable products that customers can use along the way so we get raw feedback on what’s useful.
Speaking of actionable products, I want to address a few alternatives to our current app that have been suggested to our team numerous times (to the point where it’s almost a cliché)
idea 1: ticketing platform
To get the best data possible, you have to control ticketing thus naturally it makes sense to build a ticketing platform. Ticketing is the cornerstone of venues, performers, and fan so anything that can correlate all three of those together has it all. Along with data, the pros include:
control over the rest of the event lifecycle such as dictating pricing, who performers where, how much payouts are (the Live Nation/Ticketmaster strategy)
diverse monetization strategies
potential revenue stream from allowing others to use our data
could monetize using a take rate on ticket/merch sales
could monetize using a freemium SaaS model for promoters/venues depending on the feature set
Ultimately though, while the pros of building a ticketing platform are numerous, building one wouldn’t immediately solve any customer problem. We’re better off partnering with a ticketing startup. There are plenty of companies doing their own ticketing (e.g. dice.fm, shotgun.live, eventbrite, etix, etc.) that aren’t Ticketmaster who all, in my opinion, do a pretty good job at ticketing. There is no value I see Tapped adding to the ticketing space other than selfishly wanting the data they have. There are a few potential innovations I could see, for example, I’ve heard an idea to use NFT tickets and bake into the smart contract that whenever a ticket is resold, the performer gets a cut. That’s cool but I’m sure someone like dice.fm has thought of something like that already (if you’re associated with dice.fm and reading this, I love your product, email me)
idea 2: performer marketplace
For those that remember, Tapped originally was a marketplace. The idea being, a major pain point for live shows is the transaction portion. A lot can go wrong and there isn’t a lot of infrastructure set up at a non-Live Nation show for what to do when something doesn’t go as planned.
There’s tons of resources and playbooks for creating marketplaces (e.g. https://www.everythingmarketplaces.com/) but they’re inherently hard. Tons of performer/venue marketplaces exist already includes GigFinesse, Gigmit, Gigmor, (you see a trend? lol) as well as many others who all generally learn that they have to innovate in one specific niche to get any beachhead or get close to reaching marketplace liquidity. Tons of performers are willing to jump on the app but you’ve got to fight tooth and nail to get any substantial number of promoters/venues to want to use you. I could write a small textbook on pros and cons of Tapped being a marketplace but the decision to not be one came down to “there’s easier ways to achieve our goal”.
With that aside, rather than creating a ticketing app or marketplace, we can achieve our mission in a significantly simpler way by partnering with them. I hate being blocked by other people or companies so to supplement partner data, the first step in our master plan is to collect a lot of data ourselves (booking, payment, ticketing, performers, venues, etc. etc.). Without giving too much away, we have some of our own data from the team’s previous ventures, data from advisors, partners, and the means of collecting data at scale on a daily+weekly basis.
To maximize our time, we released our first product in April 2024 with the little bit of data that we had to start out with. It’s targeted at our first customer segment of performers for a few reasons:
It required less data to create an MVP that solved their pain point
It speeds up our own data collecting. We have a few thousands users with some fraction performing actively so we can get more info on
venues we didn’t know about
payout info
booking schedules and preferences we might not have known about
and of course performers you won’t find on most other people’s datasets
And, to be frank, my team and I are all in our early-mid 20s. We’re well connected people but we don’t get the same respect when we walk into another company’s office selling our “unique industry insights”
Our first product launch buys us ethos, good feedback, and time to partner with companies and collect data. You’d also be surprised by how big the market is for performers: assuming around 25M indie performers in the US, a subscription price of $10, and ~5% penetration, the ARR of Tapped would be $150M.
Step two of the master plan is to use what we’ve learned and launch a product designed for deeper in the market: music professionals. By music professionals I broadly mean label execs, venue owners, marketers, A&Rs, agencies, etc etc. We’re able to charge a much higher premium with this segment but the CaC will also be significantly higher at first. We’ll have to have an airtight product that can provide a measurable increase (at least 10x) in their profit with things like an increase in ticket sales and merch sales while also significantly decreasing the cost to scout a good performer, the loses from a performer doing poorly, and the overall cost of event coordination.
a more transparent music industry
It should be said that I believe tech has only scratched the surface of the music industry. Silicon Valley and the tech industry is allergic to complex deals with strings attached and mountains of government regulation. The original “move fast and break things” companies either flew too close to the sun or were nerfed by the monopoly of the record labels. Music’s not what a consumer’s first guess would be if asked to name regulated markets, but the mess that is publishing rights, performance rights, reproduction rights, and the monopolies generally abusing these rights has caused a lot of friction in embracing tech as quickly as other markets. The market as a whole is confusing and there’s very little transparency in what’s happening or why.
Fortunately for Tapped, we purposely placed ourselves in a way that none of these block us. If anything, with the recent news of Live Nation/Ticketmaster being sued, there’s a bright future ahead for Tapped. So, in short, the master plan is:
Don’t tell anyone
