In the penultimate edition of Downtown's predictions series, we hear from found.ee President, Jason Hobbs...
How do you predict technology will impact the business and the industry at large in 2024?
JH: There are certainly many ways it will affect the industry, so I’ll focus on my primary vantage point. Tech companies are making it more and more difficult to be able to see the full picture and understand our fans. The deprecation of cookies, and reliance on big data with probabilistic algorithms, makes us reliant on directional assumptions. It puts us more in the dark, and means we’ll all go back to living the old adage, “I know half my marketing dollars are working, I just don’t know which half.”
What do you think presents the biggest opportunity for creators and their teams?
JH: Direct-to-fan. This was a focus of creators and their teams in the past. It’s time to re-emphasize capturing emails, phone numbers, Spotify tokens, etc. It’s time to get back to creating interesting tangibles, and selling them directly through your own store, and owning the customer purchase data yourself.
What is the most important thing the industry should look to achieve in 2024?
JH: The industry should look to achieve data-parity, on par with other industries. The music industry needs to harness the full power of data, like other industries already have. On the whole, we’re far behind. We have very little transparency in our fan/customer journeys, and this is just a result of DSP’s and ticketing platforms intentionally blocking our views. Whether it’s the automotive industry or the mattress industry, no other industry accepts this obfuscation. We also need to collectively understand the value of our data, and rather than allow these big tech companies to earn all of our potential data revenue, we should adopt their approach, leverage the marketplaces, and sell the data ourselves – it’ll give artists a brand new way of generating revenue at the same time.
Your artist to watch in 2024.
JH: Sugi Dakks - https://www.sugidakks.com – I stumbled on Sugi Dakks at a Sofar Sounds event that he put on himself. I was blown away by the music, and enthralled by the whole live experience. It was a real experience, not just a typical music set. After digging into the rest of Sugi’s music, I found that there was a wealth of compelling content that took a lot of time, attention to detail, and a great vision to create. Sugi Dakks is great for the future of music.
