A music festival couldn’t happen without technology. But technology is also what can make a festival experience great.
You’ve probably already heard about how tech makes for easier mobile ticket-buying, entry, on-site purchasing, and social media sharing. These ideas are no longer revolutionary. So how can you improve the attendee experience in a radical way — and also radically grow your business?
At XLIVE 2016 in Las Vegas this week, Eventbrite’s Co-founder and CEO Julia Hartz gave a keynote about the future of music festival technology. As the founder of an event tech company — and a fanatical festival devotee — she gave insight into the three ways technology will rocket the music festival experience into the future.
Technology #1: Access Control
In the early 2010s, festival organizers moved en masse to online ticketing. This was a revolution for attendees, who no longer had to keep track of paper tickets. And customer support was now freed from the burden of reprinting lost tickets at the last minute.
Soon, though, taking out your mobile phone to scan an e-ticket is going to seem old fashioned, thanks to access-control technologies like RFID. Radio frequency identification tags, most commonly issued as bracelets, don’t just allow attendees easy entry at the wave of a wristband. They also allow people to enjoy a much more seamless, engaged festival experience for everyone involved. RFID and its sister technology, geofencing, offer rich data-tracking capabilities for organizers and ways for attendees to find each other in a crowd based on precise GPS location.
Imagine attendees linking their social media accounts to their locations within a festival. For instance, a Tweet gets sent instantly if an attendee enters the main stage area as a certain artist is about to go on. Forward-thinking music festivals like Coachella are already using this sort of technology to customize “festival diaries” for attendees that recap where they spent their day, along with any tweets or photos they shared.
Even more remarkable: in a not-so-distant future, all this technology will be possible without requiring physical wristbands. The future of technology is invisible.
Technology #2: Cashless Money
Another area that technology can radically impact is fan spending. Attendees already cherish the ability to take advantage of cashless spending at music festivals, thanks to technology like Squarespace. But these systems are reliant on WiFi and cell signals, and tend to go down. So how else will the future make it easy to buy, and buy more?
Back to RFID — some festivals are already enabling attendees to link a credit card to a bracelet so they can make purchases with their wristband. It’s a cashless world of convenient, easy transactions. Buh-bye long lines and lost credit cards — and hello wallet-free shopping.
Last summer, we conducted a survey which showed that over a third of attendees used cashless payment methods at a festival at some point. In general, they spent almost twice as much as what others spent with traditional payment methods.
It’s not just about monetary profit, though. The great majority of festival attendees polled said that cashless payments improved their overall experience. It’s about the holy grail of music festival value: experience.
Technology #3: Buying Anywhere
A seamless discovery-to-purchase process is the ideal customer journey. Meaning, the customer finds out about your music festival and is able to purchase a ticket right away.
Technology is shortening this process by enabling customers to buy tickets the moment they hear about the event — for instance, with a button on Facebook or in an email. Payment technology is vastly improving this capability. That includes both online ticketing and the ability to store credit card information securely on various platforms.
In the future, attendees will be able to find and buy tickets to your festival from blog posts, on search engines, across social media, and virtually everywhere else you could imagine. And as the technology gets better and better, recommendations will get more and more relevant. Never again will you hear someone say, “I wish I had heard about that! I totally would have gone!”
Want to learn more about the future of music festival technology? Twenty music and tech tastemakers shared their predictions in our new report, The Future of Concert Technology.
