Tigmus To Help Venues Fill Spaces

Tigmus is a database of about 900 venues across the UK and Europe, and 400 artists. The events team or in-house promoter working at any given venue can book acts through the platform, and artists can find venues that match their size and fan base.

According to the Tigmus founders Tom Hodgson and Oli Steadman, who you may know from the band Stornoway, a lot of venues operate a second room besides their main floor.

“They have a big venue space and a medium venue space of about 200 to 400 capacity. And those second rooms are usually massively underutilized,” Hodgson told Pollstar. “What we say is, ‘look, you’ve got a lot of spare capacity. Why don’t you allocate that capacity to Tigmus, and we’ll help you fill those spaces more frequently, which will boost your revenues. And because we’re managing all of this through Tigmus, it’s going to save you time.”

The company works like an agent, just cheaper, which Hodgson and Steadman see as a main selling point. “If the artist gets a good fee, then we take a 10 percent commission on that. So we try and price ourselves cheaper than a more established booking agent that traditionally takes between 15 and 20 percent,” Hodgson explained. Tigmus has a ticket offering too, in which case it’ll “add a few pennies on every ticket” to fund itself.

According to Steadman, “there’s a strong business case but also a strong brand incentive” for venues. Filling smaller event spaces with developing artists allows a sponsor like O2 to change its image from a simple mobile network operator to an incubator for new talent and grassroots music. The aim is to enter into partnerships with venues and “hopefully” festivals as well going forward. “Some quite big ones” will be announced shortly.

Hodgson explained what such a partnership could look like: “The venue itself will have a link on its homepage for up and coming artists that want to play at the venue. The link will take them to the venue’s Tigmus profile page. We will then crunch all the data and feed the best artists back to the venue. At the same time we’ll make sure that the artists that don’t make the grade get fed into slightly smaller venues, so that everyone gets a gig and there’s a really clear line of progression.”