The city of Manchester, UK is one well-known for its rich musical heritage and so it’s no surprise that recently the city has become home to Crowd.fm, a startup that aims to help music promoters manage multiple social networks and listings websites, described as “An amazing platform for getting events listed with a single click” by its founder Tekin Suleyman when I met him for a coffee and a chat in the city’s Northern Quarter recently.
I know from my own experience that the life of a promoter or event organiser can often be a busy one, whether it’s a full-time operation or something you manage in your spare time. Needless to say, posting to multiple websites and social networks, as well as tracking the responses to these posts can be a time-consuming process – especially when you bear in mind the number of social channels and websites you need to have activity on in order to get the right profile.
Crowd.fm is an appealing solution because it plugs into the best of these, namely Facebook (where it feeds into a Page’s events section), Twitter, Songkick, Eventful and Upcoming, and it’s adding more all the time, with Last.fm event listings due to be added in the next few days. It has also already been tested by several established Manchester venues including Islington Mill and Band on the Wall – both of which have a high volume of events and strong need to be active on social channels.
Having proven the platform’s effectiveness with these venues, Tekin has been busy developing the platform for wider use and is planning to add extra features which will enable better engagement with fans, such as a means of scheduling reminder messages to possible attendees. “Comprehensive metrics to measure the results of (promoters’) efforts, including how they impact on ticket sales and attendance” are also on their way – certainly a wise move at a time when marketing budgets are shrinking and the real value of social is being questioned intensively.
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Beyond this, Tekin also plans to develop Crowd.fm as a tool for more than just music promoters and sees organisers of arts events, many of whom are becoming increasingly digitally aware, as a possible user base. He’s also keen to develop an API in the future, since the event data the platform will contain could be as useful to music app developers as The Echo Nest’s or Last.Fm’s is currently.
Aimed at promoters with lots of events to sell tickets for, Crowd.fm is available on three pricing tiers after a free trial. For the first six months, you’ll pay between $24.50 and $99.50 per month, depending on the number of events you want to promote (UPDATE: since this article was published, the pricing has been revised to $9.99 per month with unlimited events). Pricing then doubles after that first half-year – still reasonable for those who make a living from events but want to save time and hassle when promoting them.
Crowd.fm is now accepting invites to its closed beta, so if you have events to promote, give it a go with the free trial by signing up today.
➤ Crowd.fm
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