In the past few months, Bandsintown has quietly been expanding its presence among artists and live music fans on Facebook with the release of their new, cross-platform tour dates app. 

While not the only concert app on Facebook, Bandsintown offers a particularly integrated solution. The app enables artists to manage and promote real Facebook events and ticket links on their Facebook pages and across their websites, MySpace pages, Tumblogs and Twitter.

Randy Nichols, who uses Bandsintown for his roster at Force Music Media, told Hypebot via email that the app has helped ease the burden of updating and managing tour dates online and is also very effective in terms of ticket sales and RSVPs. "They helped us take our pre-sale for Underoath's most recent tour to a new level, nearly doubling our pre-sale numbers from our previous tour."

Previously, Hypebot has covered many new ticketing companies, like Outbox and Ticketfly, who believe that providing venues with integrated ticketing and social media tools will give them a competitive edge in chipping away at Ticketmaster's historically dominant position. What is unclear, however, is whether an approach built around venues alone is enough to counterbalance the extremely large fan database Ticketmaster has built over the years.

To Bandsintown CEO Todd Cronin, this is exactly the point. "The ticketing company of the future will embrace the artist as an integral part of their ticketing platform because the artist has the access to the fans and can promote and sell the tickets much more effectively than a promoter or venue."

Already being used by nearly ten thousand artists – including Coldplay, Shakira, Tim McGraw, and Lil Wayne – Bandsintown is one of the largest and fastest growing event and ticketing apps on Facebook with over 1.7 million active users.

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Web Example: We The Kings.
Facebook Example: Lil Wayne.

All of my artists use

Songkick recently rolled out their own version of this and have a lot of "high visibility" partners in the tech scene...

But BandsInTown have already been working through issues for the past 2 years for artists taking feedback from venues and artists and users to create a more fluid experience...

I just wish they could develop faster!!!

To set up Facebook Insights for your Bandcamp site:

1. Log in to Facebook, and go to http://facebook.com/insights.
2. Click the button in the upper right that says "Insights for your Domain."
3. Make sure the "Link With" dropdown is set to your Facebook name, and not the name of your Facebook Band page. Your Facebook name is followed by "(you)".
4. Copy the number from the little graphic that reads something like "<meta property="fb:admins" content="123456789" />." Facebook has made it a bit tricky to select just the number, so you'll probably have to copy that whole line of text, paste it into whatever text editor you have handy, and then copy just the number out of that. This is your Facebook ID.
5. Leave that dialog open, and in another browser window, log in to Bandcamp, go to Profile, and in the section titled "Facebook," paste your Facebook ID. Click Save.
6. Go back to your Facebook Insights window, and in the dialog that you left open ("Get Insights for Your Domain"), enter your Bandcamp URL in the field labeled "Domain." If you have a custom domain, do not enter it here. The URL should look like "foo.bandcamp.com".
7. Leave "Link With" set to your Facebook name -- remember, it's the one followed by "(you)." Click Check Domain. You're almost done!
8. Go to one of your Bandcamp track or album pages, click the Like button (just beneath the cover art) and then reload the page. There should now be a link next to the Like button that says "Admin Page." This is a Facebook Insights page linked to that particular album or track. Now you really are done.

Your Bandcamp domain will now appear in the list of domains along the left side of the Facebook Insights page, and links to individual Insights admin pages, visible only to you, will appear on all your Bandcamp track and album pages.

For troubleshooting, visit: http://bandcamp.com/facebook_insights

When Nic Adler started advertising on Facebook in February 2010, he was looking to crank up the volume for his Los Angeles music venue. Located on famous Sunset Boulevard, The Roxy Theatre features bands from all over the world across all different genres of music, ranging from acoustic to hard rock to techno. By running ads on Facebook, Nic, owner of The Roxy Theatre, was able to increase the number of people who connected to The Roxy Theatre Facebook Page by 65,000 in only three months, giving him 65,000 new people whom he could easily update about the venue’s events and engage with its unique culture.

 

Nic wanted to position The Roxy Theatre as a leading venue in the entertainment industry. Plus, he also sought to increase its overall ticket sales. After years of using traditional forms of advertising, the venue also decided to use Facebook to build a larger international audience.

 

When setting out to increase the number of people who connected to the theatre’s Facebook Page, Nic thought it would be best to advertise The Roxy Theatre’s Facebook Page itself. He included strong calls to action and used specific Likes and Interests targeting related to the genre of the band being promoted in the ad. For example, when Nic created an ad for the hard rock band, Guns N’ Roses, he chose Likes and Interests such as: ‘Alice Cooper’, ‘Guns N’ Roses’, ‘Anthrax’, and ‘Judas Priest’. He also included compelling text that featured the band name and event dates. This combination allowed Nic to create a high-performing ad that caught his audience’s attention.

 

In addition to creating strong ads, Nic also took advantage of The Roxy Theatre’s Facebook Page to post status updates multiple times each day. He featured questions, links, and updates that encouraged engagement among users connected to the Page. These status updates now drive over 4 million page views and 9,500 interactions per month.

 

In just three months of advertising on Facebook, more than 65,000 people connected to The Roxy Theatre’s Page. It is currently one of the top nightclubs/venues on Facebook. Furthermore, it has since set and reached a goal to obtain 100,000 connections by December 2010.

 

Today, more than 126,000 people have connected to The Roxy Theatre’s Page. It looks forward to marketing new events this year and continuing its success with Facebook Ads.

My favorite venue because it's run by geeks!

From a business contact who works over at Facebook... Pretty amazing.

Are you an artist who likes giving downloads away for free but would like something (besides money) in return from your fans? What if you could exchange a social interaction which helps market your music such as a tweet on Twitter or share on Facebook for the download? This idea of “social currency” is not new, but we’ve made it very easy to do with a new open-source app call SoundCloud-Social-Download.

The app automagically rolls together interactions from four of the biggest social networks (tweet on Twitter, share on Facebook, update on MySpace, & Digg… on Digg) and throws in Email capture for good measure to make the ultimate “social for download” campaign. Once a user completes one of the required interactions, they are served up a secure download straight from your SoundCloud account.

Here’s a short screencast about how the app works:

And here’s some examples of the app in the wild:

• alainjohannes.heroku.com
• playingmyheart.heroku.com
• love-amongst-ruin.heroku.com
• armageddoncomealive.com

The code is available (and completely free to use, change, etc) on the SoundCloud github. From there you’ll also find step-by-step documentation, walking you through setup, configuration, customization, and deployment. Let us know what you think and please drop us a line if you use the app. If you’re having technical issues, please submit your problem here.

Stay tuned for more open-source apps coming soon…

Did someone say Check in for Download?

P.S. If you’re a developer who is comfortable deploying these open-source apps, we’ve got a ton of SoundCloud artists who could use the help and wouldn’t mind paying for it. Let me know @LeeMartin

Billboard and Hypebot both had articles this week speculating who Google may be calling to lead their music initiative. Surprisingly, my name was on the lists and I had more than a few inquiries hit my mailbox asking how I felt about it.

Rest assured, I can happily report I’m not leaving Topspin for Google or any place else (and hopefully the Topspin board feels the same!). Google is certainly an interesting company and I’d love to see how they compare to my AOL and Yahoo! experience — I actually get a kick out of seeing how these big companies run (or don’t, as the case may be), but there is nothing on my mind at the moment aside from working with the killer Topspin team to build the marketing and retail platform used by every professional in the music business. While I know many entrepreneurs who have vowed to never pour their energy into the unforgiving abyss of digital music again (y’all know who you are!), this business is my passion and I plan on being a part of it one way or another for the rest of my life. As such it’s a huge honor to see my name on a list of “top anything” in the world of nerds and music. Thanks again Antony and Bruce for the kind words, I’ll try my hardest to live up to them.

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RootMusic has been killing it... Keept it up!

We announced plans last October to remove application boxes and application info sections as well as reduce the width of application tabs to optimize for the new profile and Facebook Pages format. We will be moving forward with these changes the week of August 23, and want to help you understand what to expect.

Based on feedback from developers, we have committed to the following plans to ensure a smooth transition:

• Boxes. We will notify users via messaging in profile boxes and in the Help Center that the "Boxes" tab, boxes on profiles and Pages, and application info sections will be going away.
• Application Tabs. Next week, we will give Page admins the ability to preview their custom tabs in the new 520 pixel width so they can modify their layouts as needed. All profile and Page tabs will be resized automatically beginning the week of August 23.

These updates are designed to simplify navigation for users, reduce complexity for developers, and enable us to build the next generation of tools for growing your business with Facebook. We'll share more of our plans for the roadmap in the coming weeks.

Fran, a Platform product marketing manager, is busy updating the roadmap.

I hope all the developers for the apps we use with our bands will fix this in time!