‘A Kind Of IMDb For The Music Industry’: Q’s With Viberate Co-Founder Vasja Veber

Viberate promises event organisers a fully functioning app and landing page without the need to invest in expensive websites or custom built mobile apps.

Viberate gathers all of the information a fan might expect from a festival app from various sources, brings it together in one place and updates it automatically. By the company’s own admission, its sites and apps are powered “by a large, robust database, made from a mix of key data points from socials, streaming services, and ticketing company APIs; contributions from users; and information verified by a legion of professional curators around the globe.”

On the Viberate platform, entities are organized by event, festival, artist, venue, genre, subgenre, city, and country. Entities are crowdsourced with the help of over 20,000 contributors, and each and every entry is then curated by a team of 70 full-time database curators. 

Viberate also taps into the API’s of major ticket vendors, which provide tens of thousands of events daily, adding to manually contributed events users put up on the platform. Artist profiles are also rich with content and always up-to-date, since Viberate sources the content from entities’ official sources and enriches the content with metadata.

Viberate has tested its concept with five mid-sized festivals in Europe, including Metaldays and Sea Dance Festival. The goal had been to get 30% to 40% download rates for the festivals’ mobile apps. According to Viberate, 80% of festival goers downloaded the apps, thereby creating a valuable channel for festival organizers to reach and target their audiences. 

The company says it costs festival organizers a few hundred dollars a month to use Viberate with no additional costs or fees.

Igor Vidović, marketing manager at EXIT, which runs several European festivals, including Sea Dance, said, “the Sea Dance app proved to be very useful for all our festival-goers, providing them with up-to-date information at any given moment, allowing them to chat with their peers and giving them access to their own festival timeline. In conclusion, we are looking forward to working with Viberate in the future as we’re certain we’ll easily tackle any upcoming challenges.”

Viberate co-founder Vasja Veber says the crowdsourced aspect of Viberate’s data means festival goers’ experiences are captured on the profile or in the app in unique ways. For example, a recent feature added to Festival and Venue profiles, is the Beer Index. Festival patrons can use the Beer Index to pick out a festival destination that is right for their music taste but also ther beer budget.

 

“This is a fun metric that we are testing right now and it’s completely crowdsourced. Visitors can report an average beer price in a venue or at a festival. Beer price is the universal indicator of the overall price range of a certain destination,” Veber explained.

“We got the idea when everyone was complaining that in Ibiza, they’ll charge you 17 euros for a beer. At the same time, people really enjoyed festivals in Poland or the Czech Republic, in part because beer there is really cheap. If you compare prices of everything else in those destinations, you’ll see that the ratios are similar, and that can change how you approach a festival and what decisions you make. It’s all about using data to enhance music experiences,” he said. 

Pollstar asked Veber to explain the concept behind Viberate in a bit more detail.

Vasja Veber: Not exactly. Picture Viberate as a kind of IMDb for the music industry. Aside from hundreds of thousands of profiles of artists, venues and events, Viberate also features around 4,000 festival profiles. Those profiles feature basically everything one needs to know about the festival: date, location, ticket links, pics, amenities, highlights, accommodation options and most importantly – the lineup. 

Festival organizers can claim their profile and then they can choose to create a mobile app for iOS and Android. They can edit the information on their Viberate profile and all changes automatically get pushed into the app. The main advantages are that they don’t have to invest into expensive app development (there is no starting cost, just a monthly subscription) and they even don’t have to deal a lot with the content as everything is sourced from their profile on Viberate.

Vasja Veber: No, because you don’t have to be a contributor to use the service. You can simply register and browse around, discover new artists, follow the ones you love, check venues nearby and see what’s going on in them.

Correct. So if Coachella booked Rita Ora for their next edition, her profile will pop up in the lineup section within the app. If Rita then releases a new track and puts it on her YouTube, the video will pop up in her profile. We even go beyond that and highlight only content that is trending. 

We can highlight videos that got the most plays in the last week or feature a piece of content from Instagram that has the most likes and comments. This way we can present the artist with their most popular and representative content. 

Yes. Users can do a quick check of the artist within the app, so they can watch featured videos or even listen to track previews from select streaming services. If they want to find out more about the artist, they can then navigate to their full profile on Viberate.