Viberate is bringing data-driven insights and a better approach to award nominations to Miami this month, as part of Winter Music Conference. First, the live music data platform has surfaced nominees for the WMC’s high-profile International Dance Music Awards (IDMA), with the final award going to the nominee who receives the most votes. Viberate will also be hosting a panel on the WMC Main Stage with media and industry voices addressing the importance of data for live music and festivals.

For the second year, Viberate has analyzed five key data points to determine which artists had the greatest impact in the previous year. After the WMC determines the award categories, Viberate looks at artists’ social followings, gigs and performances, peer connections and network, fan growth, and, importantly, fan engagement “because you have to be a human to engage,” notes Viberate co-founder Vasja Veber.

“We chose indices that would present a balanced, neutral picture of who has real traction in particular sub-genres and formats,” explains Veber. “We didn’t want this to devolve into a simple bot popularity contest. So peer connections, fan engagement, and live shows all play into our calculations.” (The full list of nominees can be found here.)

Viberate’s data-driven approach is a natural extension of their massive network of carefully curated artist, venue, and festival profiles. The platform will share what it’s gleaned from years of managing and analyzing data at a discussion on the WMC Main Stage on March 18 titled “Data Science--Can Social Media and Streaming Metrics Be the Deciding Factor Between Profit and Loss?” The panel features producer Deniz Koyu, entrepreneur and artist Arabian Prince, Rolling Stone’s Emily Blake, Napster’s André Glanz, and Veber, for a discussion of how dance music events and artists can best use data to boost their business. 

“The margins of so many events and tours are extremely thin,” Veber says. “Data can help ensure we have more sustainable, thriving live music events and more successful touring artists. This is about more than tracking likes; it’s about getting a real data-informed picture of who’s getting traction and what’s working.”

Appeared in Hypebot

If you’ve talked to anyone in the music or entertainment space over the last ten years, you’re likely to have heard complaints and laments about the state of data in the industry. Though recording and composition metadata are often at the center of these woes in music--they are, after all, how creatives and rights holders get paid--other slices of the music business are faring even worse when it comes to data.
 
There’s lots of gushing about everything from AI to blockchain, technologies that many of us take very seriously, but at the bottom of the problem is just one big, tough-to-untangle data mess. 
 
The nature of the mess may sound familiar to many outside of music and live entertainment. The data tend to be of very poor quality; you don’t actually know who came into your club or event, as ticketing information is appallingly inaccurate, for example. Data are very dispersed, scattered across socials, retail sites, streaming platforms, and other proprietary services. Worst of all for this machine learning-powered era, some of the early indicators of what's going to be big--in the live music case, what’s taking off at certain small clubs, smaller tastemaker festivals, or key parties--may not be part of the mainstream data that's easy to integrate via existing APIs. 
 
These issues find specific form in the music and entertainment industry, but have relevance to a wide range of businesses, from hospitality and event organizing to DTC and other data-reliant retail. And in live music, as in many other realms of commerce and marketing, addressing them demands a serious look at how to build a team to cultivate accurate information globally, which in turn requires a scalable approach that empowers individual data curators. 
 
To do anything with data, you have to find and refine the necessary sources for input, the data points that actually say something about the business, community, or scene. There are so many options out there in most cases that it’s tempting to rely on scraping plus a few APIs from relevant platforms. Another common approach is to simply set things up for crowdsourcing, and let the communities or customers fill in the data, yet that can quickly turn from exciting approach into moderation hell. Ideally, you want to combine a few firehose-like streams of data with important input from users who are incentivized to do a better-than-shoddy job at contributing information. In short, you need to tame what’s out there in the wild.
 
Only humans can tame this wilderness and make it productive, people specially trained to weed out poor or irrelevant data. There's too much complexity, nuance, and regional variation at this point to find automated solutions. That's why we knew, as we tackled the data mess in our business, that we needed curators, real humans who knew what looked reasonable and what seemed off. Because we’re growing a large network of profiles, crossing the million mark recently, we also knew we needed enough humans to do the work well, and needed them to have certain knowledge and skills.
 
These skills were determined by the focus we adopted early on. We knew that aiming to become something vague yet all encompassing (“the Facebook for music,” as many startups liked to bandy around at some point) would make our site useless. Furthermore, we saw a massive gap in the live event realm. So we focused on live music and how other platforms and data points speak to live music scenes. There’s a lot to be said for niche approaches, and when you want to create industry-leading data, being a generalist isn’t necessarily a logical choice.
 
In fact, our industry, like many others, has seen a proliferation of vanity metrics in the digital era, as well as metric fraud like purchasing follows and streams. To counteract these forces, we homed in on unexpected metrics and data points that tell stories helpful to our clients and users, who range from fans to festival organizers and booking agents. For example, we surface which artists of note are following one another, something hard to figure out when scanning an artists’ thousands or millions of Twitter followers. This can show unanticipated connections and suggests potential collaborations and partnerships. 
 
We also made sure to solve one of the industry’s toughest data problems, by following one simple rule. One artist = one profile. It sounds ridiculously obvious, but even the world's leading streaming platform doesn't follow that rule. The only way to achieve that level of precision is by adding a human touch. A lot of times we have to defend our claim that we have one of the largest artist databases in the world, currently just shy of 500,000 profiles. We hear things like, "yeah, but I know this service that has 2 million." They might claim this, but if you go to that particular service and type in "Tiesto", you'll get 10 or even more profiles for the same artist. From a data perspective, this renders such service useless, because having data scattered through multiple profiles for the same artist doesn't let you engage in any kind of data-related analysis. It's like one person having multiple social security numbers.
 
Along with finding these simple, but hard-to-solve data painpoints, we also looked for benchmarks and metrics that made sense to our community. For example, we realized that the price of a standard-sized beer was a great benchmark for the overall cost of a festival or venue, guiding music fans to find the right experience for their budgets and helping event operators see how they measure up to the competition. People note the cost of a pint, our curators validate it, and we can then show a meaningful data point to our users. Other industries may find other quirky yet extremely telling metrics that can only be revealed by well-cultivated data.
 
On top of right-scaled humans and data that actually matters, you need a large dose of flexibility. To find enough skilled people with a broad grounding in pop culture and strong local knowledge, we had to get creative. We found lots of talented and qualified people in our home region of Eastern Europe. We recruited people from around the world, and used crypto to pay those in unstable regions who had the skills we needed. For example, we found a good group of curators in Venezuela, where inflation almost instantly destroys fiat currency values and where banking is chaotic, to say the least. By keeping our focus reasonable, we can make their jobs reasonable, reducing curation or moderation burnout.
 
These approaches need to be tailored to your industry, but the human-machine balance in cultivating quality, actionable data should be your goal. It’s allowed us to raise the bar on insights into the live music business, insights we expect to continue to grow richer as time passes. A scalable curation system is possible, with the right mix of openmindedness, tech tools, and smart people.

Building a stand-alone, branded app is hard. For festivals, stakes are high, but resources are limited. The wreckage is easy to see in the reviews of festival apps, where even high-profile festivals with high ticket prices seem to struggle to deliver basic functionality and accurate lineups.

Viberate has changed that. For a tenth of the cost, the global live music data network offers festivals a complete branded app with continuously updated lineup information, as well as all the other bells and whistles attendees expect, from chats to sponsor shout outs.

“We’ve offered these apps to a series of mid-sized European festivals, and all have renewed for the next edition,” explains Viberate’s Vasja Veber. “The feedback we’ve gotten from organizers and from users--83% gave our apps 5 stars--demonstrates how important these apps are for festivals.” 

Viberate uses its carefully curated data for artists and events from around the world to keep all artist information and assets current via API on every festival app. All organizers need to do is enter the lineup and a few other details, and their app is ready to roll out. Viberate crafted its apps to reflect the real purpose of a good festival app, to increase attendee engagement and boost sales of upgrades, for example. (Viberate saw VIP experience purchases increase by an average of 20% at participating festivals.)

“We believe apps are one of the most important – if not THE most important – tools for engaging festival fans,” notes Andrej Sevšek, promoter for the Punk Rock Holiday festival. “The collaboration was one of the most professional, cool, and down-to-earth experiences we’ve had in a long time. It was almost love at first sight – and the feeling still lasts!”

“Your app should be the least of your worries, as a festival organizer,” says Veber. “It should be the silent partner promoting the experiences you’re offering.”

Festivals may come in all shapes, styles, and flavors, but they all struggle with one problem: How to keep on top of the flood of information about lineup artists and how to organize festival information in easy-to-navigate ways. Websites are expensive to build and update. A custom mobile app is even more so, with development costs reaching into the five figures. 

“By what we've seen during our market research, official festival websites often suck. There's no way of saying that nicely,” notes Viberate co-founder Vasja Veber. “They might look pretty, but information is lacking or hard to find. They often present a lineup by simply uploading the festival flyer and that's it. Then it's up to us potential festival goers to zoom in and read the names and look up those artists unknown to us.”

Viberate has been building a better way to present and maintain detailed festival info on one short, sweet landing page, one that festival organizers can use to generate an effective, inexpensive custom mobile app for both Andriod and iOS. An app wizard is rolling out soon, to guide festivals step-by-step through the code-free process. Viberate-generated sites and apps are powered by a large, robust database, made from a mix of key data points from socials, streaming services, and ticketing company APIs; contributions from users; and information verified by a legion of professional curators around the globe.

On the Viberate platform, entities are organized by event, festival, artist, venue, genre, subgenre, city, and country. Entities are crowdsourced with the help of over 20,000 contributors, and each and every entry is then curated by a team of 70 full-time database curators. Viberate also taps into the API’s of major ticket vendors, which provide tens of thousands of events daily, adding to manually contributed events users put up on the platform. Artist profiles are also rich with content and always up-to-date, since Viberate sources the content from entities' official sources and enriches the content with metadata.

“A couple other platforms offer easy creation of mobile apps, but what sets us apart is that we source all Artist and Venue data into the app directly from our database. Festival promoters don't have to deal with content,” a major headache for festival organizers wrangling farflung artist and label teams, Veber explains. “Artists are presented with all the information we collect. That means when they upload new content on their channels right before a major tour, say, it will pop up in the appropriate festival’s app.”
 
Viberate has already tested this concept with five mid-sized festivals in Europe, including Metaldays and Sea Dance Festival. The goal: To get 30-40% download rates for the festivals’ mobile apps. The results were surprising, as 80% of festival goers downloaded the apps, creating a new and highly valuable channel for festival organizers to reach and target their audiences. The price point was right for festivals, a few hundred dollars a month with no additional costs or fees. 
 
"We've just wrapped up the sixth edition of Sea Dance Festival, marking our first collaboration with Viberate,” says Igor Vidović, marketing manager at EXIT, which runs several European festivals. “The Sea Dance app proved to be very useful for all our festival-goers, providing them with up-to-date information at any given moment, allowing them to chat with their peers and giving them access to their own festival timeline. In conclusion, we are looking forward to working with Viberate in the future as we're certain we'll easily tackle any upcoming challenges."
 
The crowdsourced aspect of Viberate’s data mean festival goers’ experiences are captured on the profile or in the app in unique ways. Perhaps the quirkiest is a recent feature added to Festival and Venue profiles, the Beer Index. Festival patrons can use the Beer Index to budget for their big splurge, or to pick a less pricey festival destination with similar music.
 
“This is a fun metric that we are testing right now and it's completely crowdsourced. Visitors can report an average beer price in a venue or at a festival. Beer price is the universal indicator of the overall price range of a certain destination,” says Veber. “We got the idea when everyone was complaining that in Ibiza, they'll charge you 17 euros for a beer. At the same time, people really enjoyed festivals in Poland or the Czech Republic, in part because beer there is really cheap. If you compare prices of everything else in those destinations, you'll see that the ratios are similar, and that can change how you approach a festival and what decisions you make. It’s all about using data to enhance music experiences,” reflects Veber

“The whole data situation is just nasty,” explains Viberate co-founder Vasja Veber. “You can’t develop anything using the current data in the live music business. It’s just too unstructured. It’s also hard to keep information updated. Standardization is our only way forward.” 

Viberate aims to standardize and map the entire global ecosystem for live music, becoming something akin to IMDb, a single, verified and artist-approved source for music information. To accomplish this, the Ljubljana-based startup uses a carefully calibrated mix of crowdsourcing and curation, and blockchain, incentivizing contributors and supporting artist control of assets and information. 

“Blockchain has become the long overdue catalyst for the music industry to update its policy and business models toward music-makers and to provide quicker and seamless experiences for anyone involved in creating or interacting with music,” notes Viberate advisor, blockchain advocate, and musical innovator Imogen Heap. “Anything that involves music-makers being independent and having space where they can reach out to anybody who wants to make business directly with them is a really positive thing.” 

Viberate allows musicians, music professionals, and fans to add profiles of artists, agents, venues, and festivals to the platform. These entries are then curated by a team of around 80 curators, located around the world. Each artist is assigned an individual ID and their profile is updated automatically as social and other content surfaces and catches on. Fans can search by their location or favorite artists, and venues and festivals have a one-stop source for verified info. To speed search and discovery, Viberate will use blockchain to put locally relevant content on users’ computers in return for compensation in cryptocurrency. 

“The vision is to become a standard in the music industry, embedding our data into bigger services that provide streaming music, ticketing, and other vital experiences,” says Veber. “In the end, we want to serve any platform or service that has to do with artist data. They can embed our venue and artist data and know they are up to date and relevant. From an artist perspective, with your Viberate profile, you can be sure every ticket vendor has the same verified, accurate data, data you can control.” 

The struggle for data and for better approach to the live music business is where Viberate began. Veber was working with Viberate co-founder Umek, a DJ and dance music artist with a strong following and numerous awards under his belt. He, Veber, and Matej Gregorcic (now Viberate’s CEO) wanted to compare how Umek was faring compared to other DJs on socials and other platforms, as well as live, but couldn’t find a simple way to do this. So they built one.

“We were investing a lot in ads on Facebook, and by a lot, I mean a quarter million dollars in 1.5 years. But we didn’t have any useful metrics to show what we were getting for that investment,” recounts Veber. “So we decided to set up a website that measured online popularity for DJs. We started with 1,200 manually entered DJs, seeing how many likes and followers and so on they had. We opened it up eventually and had 30,000 profiles in 18 months. We saw the need was there and we decided to keep going, expanding from the dance music scene.”

This relatively simple desire to map popularity in a single genre soon morphed to embrace and address a range of problems in the music business. “In recent years, the consumer side of music went through a revolution,” remarks Veber. “The tech improvement is constant for listeners. Yet on the B2B side, behind the scenes, it’s all spreadsheets and scattered information, especially in live music.” The Viberate team longed to create a friction-free marketplace for live music, complete with blockchain-powered escrow, but to do that, they had to tackle the data nightmare that plagues live music.

The data project took on a life of its own, as Viberate found the perfect balance of user input and expert curation to ensure quality and scale. “We use a mix of crowdsourcing and curation because you desperately need both,” notes Veber. “There’s no way we can know about every artist in, say, Finland or every venue in Medellin. We have to curate every entry, and we decided to invest a lot of effort and money in it.”

To enhance this process, Viberate plans to use blockchain technology to increase speed and accuracy, rolling out this new element in 2020. A distributed ledger like blockchain precludes tampering and allows geographically relevant information to be stored closer to the people most likely to need it. Users will be compensated with tokens that can be used to unlock discounts and other perks.

At the center of it all is data ownership, a concept that has increasing importance in a world reconsidering copyright, IP ownership, and data use. “We’re giving data back to artists, to let them control things,” reflects Veber. “We can give sourced, approved, artist-controlled data to various platforms, publishers, and services. This offers crucial protection under regulations like the EU’s Article 17. You can use this data and know you have the permission to do so, as it’s been cleared by the artist via Viberate.