A ‘Game Changer’ For the Live Business: Pollstar Data Cloud Launches

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Pollstar today launched Pollstar Data Cloud, a “game-changing” new platform powered by Pollstar‘s industry-leading live data through a newly announced partnership with the Google Cloud Platform Marketplace. This leading-edge product allows for limitless customizable data sets and use with third-party applications that promises artists and their teams more robust analytics and actionable insights into the live market, propelling the touring business to greater heights.

With Pollstar Data Cloud customers can now view, filter and download reports in myriad ways based on Pollstar’s concert Boxoffice data from more than 60,000 artists. Additionally, this live tool unlocks Pollstar’s live entertainment contact database for the viewing, filtering and downloading of more than 35,000 listings of key personnel and staff for venues, promoters and talent buyers, artist representatives, and other music industry stakeholders.

“We view the Pollstar Data Cloud as a quantum leap in access to our legendary database of Boxoffice, Route Book and Contact databases,” says Ray Waddell, president of the Media & Conferences Division of Oak View Group, Pollstar’s parent company. “For nearly 40 years Pollstar has collected this proprietary Boxoffice information, regarded as one of the most important metrics in live entertainment success. Unlocking the last five years of this data will empower decisions at every level of our business, ultimately helping artists maximize their revenue potential in what has become their primary revenue source— touring. When artists do better, our entire industry ecosystem does better.”

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Pollstar Data Cloud Panel with Oak View Group’s VP of Operations Jon Guynn, music agent and UTA partner Ken Fermaglich, OVG’s Director of Booking Eric Gardner and Google’s Area 120 Title Technologiest Uday Ghatikar,

The Pollstar Data Cloud was unveiled Wednesday at a session at 2020’s Pollstar Live! Conference moderated by Oak View Group’s VP of Operations Jon Guynn with veteran music agent and UTA partner Ken Fermaglich (whose clients include Guns N’ Roses, Muse and Paramore), OVG’s Director of Booking Eric Gardner, and Uday Ghatikar,  the Title Technologist at Area 120, Google’s incubator laboratory who has worked with companies that include Ticketmaster, Live Nation and AEG.

During the informative session, both Fermaglich and Gardner spoke of the importance of using tour histories, a service Pollstar has provided for nearly four decades, when setting up tours. These histories traditionally listed tours, venues, revenue, ticket prices and attendance in a raw data form, but to be able to customize and creatively constrain the parameters to make new data sets to show comparisons, growth or other insights was, at best, limited and time consuming. With the new Pollstar Data Cloud product, however, which includes Pollstar’s entire Route Book and Boxoffice data for the last five years and contact database, the possibilities are limitless.

“Game-changing,” is how OVG’s Guynn described the Pollstar Data Cloud. “This has never been available before,” he said. “You are going to be able to layer searches by event dates, by artist or a basket of artists, by gross, tickets sold or venue capacity. Results can be downloaded or licensed offline. This tool can provide specific answers in milliseconds instead of what formerly took days.”

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The new Pollstar Data Cloud interface.

Indeed, in an illustrative use case, the data was filtered to show all shows on June 1, 2019, for the state of Nevada which instantly generated all Boxoffice Reports totaling some $24 million in ticket sales. “That’s something we never would have been able to do with the old system,” Fermaglich said.

In a second use case, the data was layered for two clubs, The Independent in San Francisco and The Troubadour in Los Angeles. Parameters were further constrained to show artists who in 2019 sold more than 400 tickets and grossed more than $10,000. Within seconds a report was generated that yielded 119 shows complete with venue, show date, grosses, prices, tickets sold and promoters.

Gardner noted the breadth of the new platform’s data with some 60,000 artists and explained that it’s not only for “big arena, amphitheater, stadium headlining artists,” with data available for ticket sales for club dates. “This provides us the ability to spot trends and understand the entire spectrum of the live music industry like never before.”

The Google Cloud Platform Marketplace, where Pollstar Cloud Data is now available, also allows users to quickly deploy functional software packages that run on Google Cloud Platform. GCP Marketplace enables customers to easily start up a familiar software package with services like Compute Engine or Cloud Storage, with no manual configuration required.

During the Panel Area 120’s Ghatikar discussed the ascendance of “big data,” and noted that “more data was created in 2019 than all of the years cumulative of human kind. And in 2020 it’s going to be the same stat. You’re talking about an exponential increase in data, which brings about both opportunities and challenges.” In this regard, Pollstar Data Cloud will now have opportunities to work with other big data sets. One example given was potentially pairing historical weather information with tour routing or festival dates to forecast probabilities of inclement weather in specific locales during certain times of the year.  

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Additionally, Pollstar’s industry contact database will allow searching for artist’s representatives, as well as the ability to define filters for business types such as agents, managers, venues, concert support services, geography, and more.

The Pollstar Data Cloud is a paid subscription with incentives offered by Google Cloud Platform and discounts offered to current Pollstar subscribers. It is available by visiting https://pollstar.com/datacloud to access the sign-up portal.

The Pollstar Data Cloud is one of the products born of a new partnership between Pollstar and Google Cloud. In addition, Pollstar and parent company Oak View Group announced yesterday a partnership with Google’s Area 120 workshop for experimental products and unveiled DEMAND at Pollstar LIVE! at the Beverly Hilton – a new product that allows access to never-before-seen data, enabling the live music industry to better identify key markets, optimal pricing and purchase intent. The insights included in DEMAND’s platform integrates publicly available data from Google Trends and YouTube as well as proprietary pricing data from third parties such as Pollstar. This data, too, provides actionable, real-time analytics that enhance the planning, pricing, marketing and sponsorship of live events.

DEMAND is available at no cost to live music professionals, go to https://demand.area120.com to access its publicly available and proprietary analytics.