LOS ANGELES (CelebrityAccess) – Mandolin, the digital fan engagement platform just named Most Innovative Music Company by Fast Company, is expanding the idea of what a live streamer can do with the creation of the Venue and Promoter Network. With the Network, Mandolin’s Artist partners will be able to access an expanding list of [participating] venues and promoters where they can turn over the work of coordinating, promoting, and producing the live streaming element of their concerts to Mandolin directly, making Mandolin the “promoter” of the live stream shows.
“We love working with Mandolin. They give fans outside of our markets the opportunity to experience City Winery concerts from the comfort of home. Their live streams look and sound great, and they really capture the thrill of the live music experience.” – Dan Conroe, Marketing Director, City Winery.
The list of venues that have already partnered with the new Network runs from clubs to top-tier amphitheaters and arenas. Venues that are a part of the list include the City Winery locations, Red Rocks, SAP Arena, Basement East, The Cotillion, New Jersey Performing Arts Center, Milwaukee’s Riverside Theatre, Eddie’s Attic, the Kennedy Center, New Orleans’ Orpheum Theatre, Cannery Ballroom, Mercy Lounge, High Watt, and Ryman Auditorium, among others. In addition, Winter Circle Promotions has joined at a promoter level, as they handle a lot of the Gulf Coast area.
The new Network removes the time-consuming and often expensive coordination process with venues, promoters, and production teams. With the return of live music stretching venue and promoter resources extremely thin, they often lack the workforce to address artist concerns on a show-to-show basis, let alone the job(s) of booking, coordinating, and promoting hybrid live stream events. Recent data reported via press releases shows these streams effectively reach underserved fans, as 75% of stream purchasers are from zip codes outside of states where most tour stops occur.
In a discussion with Variety, Mandolin CEO Mary Kay Huse said: “The feedback we were even getting from artists was that they wanted to do more live streaming from venues, or from their tour, but just knowing what the costs were was super time-consuming. And with all the coordination across all the stakeholders, sometimes the artists were like, ‘Well, that’s gonna be maybe more time than we have right now, even though we want to do the live stream.’
So the strategy at its core is: We’ve built out this network of venues, where we have pre-negotiated terms and know exactly what it takes to get a live stream up and running there. Once we partner with the venue and have that partnership, we work with them on their calendar of events, whether they’re posted or in process, and strategize on which ones make sense to live stream. And then we go work with that agent and manager to make a live stream at the venue, but we have the logistics taken care of. We know what the expense coordination looks like, and it makes it just much more smooth and seamless for the venue and the artist’s team as well as ourselves.”
