LOS ANGELES — Streaming music service Deezer is partnering with artist-profile company BandPage to let listeners know when their favorite musicians are in town.
The tie-up comes on the heels of Internet radio company Pandora’s purchase of ticket-seller TicketFly for $450 million last week, and is the latest attempt to address the problem of unsold concert tickets.
The music industry is seeing download purchases decline while streaming plans get more popular. As a result, musicians continue to make more money touring than they do distributing their music online.
With the partnership between Deezer and BandPage, listeners will be notified when artists they stream the most are performing nearby. BandPage CEO J Sider says testing has shown that targeting these messages carefully can vastly improve response rates, whether users are notified by email, by smartphone notification or with an audio advertisement by the artist right after one of their songs plays.
San Francisco-based BandPage has supplied artist biographies, ticket and merchandise information to other services including Spotify and Rdio, but they require users to seek out the information on the artist’s page. With Deezer, the notices will be tailored to listener behavior and be more proactive. The two companies will share revenue that is generated by referrals.
“You’re only going to receive a couple of these a month if that,” Sider said. “When you receive it, it should be this moment of joy for you, like ‘Oh, wow, great, thanks for letting me know.'”
Paris-based Deezer, which has 6 million paying subscribers and operates in over 180 countries, aims to experiment with which messages work best, said Alexander Holland, its chief content and product officer.
“We’ll always prioritize the user experience and shy away from sending something to someone who wouldn’t appreciate it,” Holland said.
