1. Home

You Made Your Fan-Funded Album. Now Go On Your ‘Fan-Sourced Tour’.

Paul Resnikoff
6

hellocleveland
  • Save

It’s the nightmare of almost every performing artist: an empty venue.  But why guess whether fans will buy tickets, when you can route a tour based on demand?  That’s exactly what the Chainsmokers are doing ahead of their next tour, with Tilt Tour virtually guaranteeing packed gigs.

“It’s the first ever fan-sourced tour,” the DJ duo proclaimed.

The Chainsmokers (think the “#Selfie” song) are using Tilt to route a relatively-safe college campus tour, with the first 6 campuses to purchases 800 tickets officially on the tour.  That number could potentially increase, though the beauty is that the Chainsmokers will only be traveling to sold-out gigs where lots of people love them.

This is definitely not the first time this concept has appeared, with KISS one big-name, early-stage experimenter.  Pandora has also been a huge proponent of smart-routing, with listening data offering obvious clues on where an artist should go.  A long list of others, including UK-based Songkick, have been tinkering along these lines, with potentially game-changing innovations ahead for how a simple, van-packing tour is conducted.

6 Responses

  1. Frank

    Paul,

    Have you investigated whether Tilt is sponsoring or in any way compensating The Chainsmokers for what looks like an endorsement/commercial for Tilt?

    The Chainsmokers had a hit song among the EDM/college demo, and they’ve done a lot of touring already, which means they already have booking agent relationships in place.

    • GGG

      Of course they are. Probably paying for a good chunk of touring costs via sponsorship.

      If you can even entertain the idea of selling 800 tix in multiple places, you don’t need to “fan-fund” (which isn’t even how this is working anyway) a tour. They are already repped by CAA, so I guess it makes that guy’s life easier, but don’t see why this is necessary. Though I guess if you can guarantee 800 tix instead of having to do promo for each show, why the hell not haha.

    • Paul Resnikoff

      No, it’s not.

      Actually, I hadn’t heard of Tilt until this morning, but ‘smart touring’ is a pretty interesting area. Let’s see how it evolves.

      • Frank

        Thanks for the response — still, the thing that makes this post appear a little sketchy is the claim that The Chainsmokers are using Tilt for booking their tour, which is technically true, but the reality is probably that Tilt is sponsoring the Chainsmokers because, like I mentioned above, they’ve already toured so it’s unlikely that they need to rely on crowd-sourcing. Plus The Chainsmokers named their tour the “Tilt Tour” . . .

        ‘Nothing wrong with Tilt sponsoring The Chainsmokers in exchange for The Chainsmokers getting the word out about Tilt . . . but it should be disclosed.