"For us, it’s not just about syndicating tour dates across the Internet, but doing so in a way that increases engagement between artists and fans around live events, ultimately resulting in higher turnout and more tickets sold." - Alexis Rodich, Bandsintown’s Director of Artist Services

Recently, MusicConsultant.com published an interview with Alexis Rodich, our director of artist services. While we recommend reading the full article, as well as checking out the many other awesome interviews and information on MusicConsultant.com, we thought we’d share some highlights from the post below:

Alexis on … Bandsintown In A Nutshell:

We are an aggregator of concert information and we curate from hundreds of sources worldwide – mostly primary ticket sellers. We use these dates as the foundation, and give artists the option to add additional dates to the system if needed through our authenticated dashboard on Facebook. Our ticket links go directly from the artists’ page or profile to the ticket company. We don’t include secondary market tickets in our database, and we don’t crowd source tour dates.

Alexis on … Going Social:

When you install Bandsintown, we automatically sync the dates in our system to your Facebook page and create real Facebook events for you. That means rather than having dates sit on top of the Facebook Platform or sending fans to another website, the dates are fully integrated into Facebook, including Timeline, without manual entry of all those events.

We’ve seen a major difference – sometimes as much as a 95% increase in event participation – based on whether or not the artist decides to push that event through Bandsintown Social or just have it sit statically on their fan page, treating Facebook like a website. In fact, posts made using Bandsintown have virality and lifetime engagement rates that far exceed many other page posts– often ranging between 1%- 10%, but we’ve seen as high as 20% virality and above.

Alexis on… Going Wide:

Building on top of that, when you use any of our tools to sync to your website, MySpace, Twitter, or blog, those tools sync with Facebook events too – so you can take advantage of features such as RSVPs, shares, comments, “likes,” etc. This enables you to capture the viral and social aspects of Facebook everywhere online.

Alexis on… Going Mobile:

Cellfish [the company that acquired Bandsintown in 2011] has deep expertise in mobile and this has been a major focus for us in the past year. I’m proud to say we’ve released iOS and Android apps that have done phenomenally well – even being considered for a Mobile Excellence Award.

From the perspective of artists using our platform, we are fully integrated into all aspects of their business. For example, when somebody RSVPs to an event via the mobile app and the artist uses Bandsintown, that notification will go directly to the artist’s Facebook event. That’s great for developing artists because we include recommended artists within the scope of the mobile app. So, it’s possible that somebody who has never heard of a band can discover them through our app, listen to them via a link to Spotify, and RSVP to that artist’s event. Our app then informs their friends about the artist on their social graph without the fan ever needing to go to the artist’s page. It’s a great opportunity for exposure and builds more engagement for the event.