Debut Of PollstarPro

Pollstar is pleased to announce the official launch of PollstarPro.com as the state-of-the-art replacement to our aging PollstarOnline website.

Access to the new site is now included as a standard part of all Pollstar subscriptions. It’s impossible to provide all the key industry data and functionality our subscribers need with just a print product.

That certainly wasn’t the case when we started in business 25 years ago, but in today’s world you’re not seriously in business without a computer and Web access. For that reason, Pollstar will no longer sell print-only subscriptions.

We had been operating both websites in parallel for the past few months while we worked to debug and improve the new site. As of January 12th we turned off the old site and redirected all traffic to PollstarPro. All existing individual PollstarOnline user names and passwords work on the new site.

While there are still changes and improvements being made to the various searches and display options, the much more powerful features of the new site dictated it was time to move everyone into the future.

As is the case with all things new, there will be a learning curve before users can make maximum benefit of the new site’s vastly improved functionality. Over the next few weeks, we will attempt to explain and demystify the major new features of the site.

We begin with one of the most powerful and unique new features: the all new Artist Avails search. Users will find this feature under the Custom Research tab at the top of the screen.

The purpose of this search is to provide talent buyers with a list of potentially available artists for booking on a specific date in a specific location. There are numerous user-defined filtering options that can greatly narrow or refine the results.

Let’s use the adjacent screen shot of the Artist Avails search page as an example of an attempt to essentially answer the following question for a talent buyer or nightclub looking to find an act to book an open date on April 18th in Asbury Park, New Jersey:

"Give me a list of all the artists who appear open on April 18th AND have a confirmed booking routed less than 250 (user defined number of 10-500) miles of Asbury Park within 3 (user defined number of 1-3) days on either side of April 18th AND has a proven box office history that demonstrates the act sells an average of (user defined) 1000 to 2000 tickets AND comes from (user defined) the Hard Rock, Jam Band or Pop/Rock genres."

The results page will show all the artists who fit the criteria, their routing before and after your open date along with the distance from Asbury Park, and in this case the actual database historical average number of tickets sold by that potentially available artist.

The basic version of the above search would not specify a musical genre or an artist’s ability to sell tickets as defined by either average sold or average gross and would thus yield a much wider set of results.

Users who will want to repeat the same search for different dates have the option of saving the parameters as a Preset Region. This will be especially time saving for talent buyers who repeatedly book acts for the same geographic location.

Please keep in mind that PollstarPro is not a finished product and we are continuing to improve the site. We encourage you to use the "Report Problem" link located in the Control Panel for user logins to describe any difficulties you might have. Live assistance is also available by calling Pollstar during normal business hours.

Here are two final user tips. One, make sure you click on the Go buttons because just hitting return will not always work to initiate a search. Two, PollstarPro is optimized for Internet Explorer. Although we are working to make the site function perfectly with all browsers, if you experience any display problems, we suggest using IE.

Next week we will explain the power of the all-new Box Office database.  For a brief overview of the Web site, click here.