iPhone app popular among concert goers

Interview with BlueHaze's CEO, Mark Shedletsky, about enhancing the concert experience

At the Outside Lands Music Festival in Golden Gate Park this past August, I was torn between so many incredibly talented artists on different stages at once and disappointed that there was no way to participate in all of the cool experiences going on around me. While listening to Widespread Panic play, it would have been great to be able to use my phone to check out others concert attendees’ photos and set lists from nearby stages.

Enter BlueHaze, a hot new company trying to make the live music experience even better by connecting fans and artists to each other. The company’s recently launched online destination, BlueHaze.com, enables users to find local concerts, get tour alerts, post their concert photos and reviews, see what shows their friends are going to, discover new bands, and more. What’s more, they developed an application for Facebook that allows users to share photos and track concert activity, and another application for the iPhone through which users can take, view, and share photos.

While both the online music and social networking industries are already crowded, BlueHaze’s founder and CEO, Mark Shedletsky isn’t worried.

 

Watson: Let’s start with some metrics. What percentage of your visitors register and begin submitting photos and interests? How many people to date have downloaded your iPhone application?

Shedletsky: The majority of the BlueHaze membership is on the iPhone. Over 50,000 members have downloaded the app in the two months it’s been live, which is a really great foundation to build upon. We’ve seen a lot of activity and time spent from all members, especially as it relates to tracking their favorite artists (almost all users take the time to set up their personal tour tracker). Almost half of the audience has posted photos, comments, etc., and there are certainly some very heavy users, going to shows weekly and actively sharing content on our site.

 

Watson: What’s to prevent iLike or imeem, who already have mass audiences, from developing similar applications and concert tools?

Shedletsky: iLike is all about music discovery in general -- across audio, video, etc -- so concerts is a small piece of their overall strategy of being the go-to music app on all social networks. Imeem is a fantastic social network with music roots. But the big difference is that neither company is solely focused on enhancing the live music experience for the fan. In most cases, other companies help fans find upcoming concerts or discover new bands, but stop there. For us, we take a deep and holistic approach to the concert experience and give fans and artists the social media tools to connect before, during and after the concert. We give fans a cool place to hang after the show and we give artists the chance to engage with their local, paying fan base.

To think about it another way, on a user’s profile page on BlueHaze, they can organize all of their upcoming concert activity, see which of their favorite artists are performing near them, track their personal concert history (like a virtual ticket stub collection), and have an archive of all of their photos from every concert. That’s too much info to cram into a user profile on iLike or Imeem.

Watson: With the slowing economy, are you seeing decreasing ticket purchases and concerts being planned?

Shedletsky: Historically, concerts have been relatively immune to downturns in the economy. If this recession is more dramatic than previous ones, I think who will get hurt the most are the big ticket concerts – fewer companies will shell out $1,000 per ticket for clients to see Madonna. But the growth in the live music industry is happening with smaller artists playing 500 to 2,000 person venues, with ticket prices between $15 and $40. I think fans will always pay a reasonable amount to see their favorite artists, as they don’t tour through your town every week, and the concert experience is something you just can’t replicate anywhere else.

Watson: Describe your revenue model. Are you considering a subscription service or running advertising?

Shedletsky: BlueHaze will make money through three revenue streams, the largest of which is advertising sponsorships – we’ll work with brands like Pepsi, AT&T, Nokia, Pontiac, etc., that have a long history of branding around live music, to find integrated online and mobile partnership opportunities within BlueHaze. We ideally want to go deep with a couple of brands and create lots of value for the advertiser and for the audience.

 

Watson: What are some of the key learnings from your MTV and BitTorrent days that you’ve incorporated into Blue Haze?

Shedletsky: There are a ton of things I learned at both MTV and BitTorrent that apply to BlueHaze. The most important was probably learning how to communicate with your audience. Our target audience is smart, savvy and fickle. If you try marketing to them, they turn off immediately. But if you offer them something of lasting value, they’ll be your biggest supporters.

 

Watson: What is your ideal exit? When do you aim to get there?

Shedletsky: Ideally, I’d like to sell BlueHaze for $100 million tomorrow to Richard Branson. He’s a fun guy to hang with and the Virgin Music Festivals are always insane. But that’s probably not going to happen. We’re building BlueHaze to be an attractive company for four sectors of the music biz:
(1) Media companies (e.g. MTV Networks, Cablevision) that could drive instant traffic to our platform and monetize it very well;
(2) Concert Promoters/Venue Owners (e.g. Live Nation, AEG Live) that could leverage BlueHaze for predictive data, marketing, and ticket sales;
(3) Ticketing companies (e.g. Ticketmaster, eBay/StubHub), that could funnel the community of active concert fans into direct ticket sales, fan club members, etc; and
(4) Record Labels (e.g. Universal, EMI) that are moving into touring to diversify and to offer a more 360 solution for their artists.

(Note: This piece was republished to highlight on VatorNews homepage)