As the live music industry faces stagnating revenue and unfriendly regulation, a startup promising to help promoters sell tickets has raised $525,000.
Audience Republic's software allows promoters to reward punters who invite their friends to purchase tickets, with lures like artist meet-and-greets or discounts to future shows. Co-founder Jared Kristensen claims the software has delivered an average 76 per cent increase in pre-sale registrations from the time a promoter enables it, with "60 to 70 per cent" of those registered going on to purchase tickets.
Those are sorely needed sales in Australia's live music and theatre sector, which generated $1.3 billion revenue in 2015-16 according to research house IBISWorld. The growth of live music has outpaced Australia's GDP for the last five years, but according to IBISWorld will struggle in future due to "market saturation" putting downward pressure on ticket prices.
About 85 per cent of the thousands of shows promoted worldwide by Live Nation and its subsidiary Ticketmaster each year do not sell out, CEO Michael Rapino recently revealed.
Another local ticket marketer, Pulse Global, recently closed a $1.2 million capital raise prior to an ASX backdoor listing, showing there is an appetite for solutions to the live music industry's revenue squeeze. The situation is being made worse by regulation, such as Sydney's lock-out laws which have "killed" the once-vibrant live scene in Kings Cross, according to Mr Kristensen.
Promoters pay Audience Republic an annual subscription and a variable fee per event marketed through the software, which hosts the campaigns on all major social media channels. The startup also tries to provide useful data on who bought tickets, using plugins to Ticketmaster and Eventbrite which to date are only the two major ticketing platforms with application programming interfaces.
"Artists everywhere are trying to take more control of their data and their marketing, so we see a big opportunity in going directly to them in future," Mr Kristensen said.
Audience Republic will not reveal revenue or subscriber numbers but Mr Kristensen claimed it had delivered $2 million in extra ticket sales to customers since it emerged from the Slingshot accelerator with $30,000 funding in 2015. He said 46,000 ticket purchases had been made after exposure to a campaign.
Audience Republic's startup culture was a match with the organisers of the many boutique music festivals which have emerged as large festivals like Big Day Out, Stereosonic and Future Music Festival collapsed., Mr Kristensen said.
It has run campaigns for Electric Gardens, Beyond the Valley, Pitch Festival, Days Like This, Mountain Sounds, Rhythm & Alps, Splore Festival and New Zealand's Rhythm & Vines. A recent campaign for the latter generated 11,000 pre-sales registrations and helped organisers sell 25 per cent of tickets for the New Years Eve 2017 event, Mr Kristensen claimed.
Investors in Audience Republic include Artesian Venture Partners, which manages the Slingshot accelerator's follow-on investment fund, and Queensland University of Technology's Creative Enterprise Australia startup fund, which has also backed GiggedIn, a startup allowing music fans to attend unlimited concerts for a monthly subscription. GiggedIn was seeded with $750,000 in 2015 and is now raising a Series A.
Angel investors in Audience Republic include Nick Ingall, Invoice2go's head of human resources and a former Spotify executive; and Ben Sharp, the local chief of ad retargeting business AdRoll, who is also the startup's chair.
