Professional Live Music Content At An Instant: First UK Venue Installs TagMix Technology Permanently

Bristol, England’s newest live events venue, The Prospect Building, has permanently installed TagMix a patented technology that ensures live performances sound the way the band intended, when sharing live footage online.

TagMix captures and share professional-quality, real time live music content instantly — without the need for editing or audio syncing. It gives festivals, venues, and touring artists an easy solution to create high-impact social media content to amplify their online presence.

Pollstar reached out to TagMix director and COO Steve Jenner, to find out how this works in concrete terms. He explained, “We have a hardware device that connects to the sound desk. This feeds the audio, over the internet, to our cloud server where it is now available, in real time, to match against any video content submitted via our software application. This matching part is the clever, patented part. It works in a similar way to Shazam but is a lot more sophisticated because it uses a moving target (live audio) rather than Shazam’s fixed one (ie. a studio master track). The process takes milliseconds, sending the enhanced video clip back to the user almost instantly, so they can share it on social media in the moment without having to wait for an edit or audio sync.”

By installing TagMix permanently, The Prospect Building in Bristol now has the means to create a vast archive of high-performing content to fuel future event promotion and long-term audience growth.

“As the industry continues to evolve, the fusion of live performance and real-time social content will be critical to growth, visibility, and ticket sales,” according to a press release from the company.

The rights clearing process, which has stopped innovative technological solutions from reaching market maturity in the past, wasn’t a problem, Jenner said. His team, he explained, “actually found the opposite. Where TagMix is (most commonly) used for shortform content on platforms like Instagram and TikTok, the 15-30 second clip length generally circumvents any rights concerns, as the usage is seen as promotional (in the artist’s favor) rather than commercial, and it is standard practice for most event organizers to post short clips of their artist performances filmed on phones, albeit with poor-quality audio, in any case.

“Nevertheless we do strongly encourage our festival and venue clients to engage with their artists in advance to inform them about the service, because – more often than not – the artists, who are as hungry for social content as the event/venue, will then build it into their own content strategy and collaborate with the event or venue, further extending the performance of the content.”

One of TagMix’s artist clients, Norman Cook, told the team, that artists suffered more than anyone else from the problem TagMix solved. “The bigger the artist, the worse they are suffering,” Jenner explained, “a downside of playing a big show or festival is that he knows that afterwards, social media will be flooded with hundreds of video clips of him that sound absolutely terrible!

“With TagMix,” Jenner continued, “he knows the content will represent him as he wants his performances to be heard, because we take the audio from the artist’s mix. As such, headliners and bigger artists are not only usually the fastest to approve TagMix usage, but they are also the ones that end up sharing the content to their own audiences, often making it go viral.”

A good case-in-point is Chappell Roan, who shared the festival teams’ TagMixed posts from Gov Ball and Lollapalooza festivals last summer, which drew millions of views each and contributed in no small way to her trajectory. Here’s an example of a TagMixed clip from Gov Ball she posted on her own TikTok channel, which reached nearly eight million views, according to Jenner.

TagMix is available as a commercial marketing enhancement service to festivals, venues and touring artists all over the world. “For festivals,” Jenner explained, “we charge a service fee to cover the event (including the hardware, software and onsite personnel). For venues and touring artists we have a rental model based on the number of shows or a fee per month for a fixed venue installation.

“In all cases, our aim is to reduce their overall marketing spend from savings in editing and aftermovie production (no longer required) and reducing their year-round online advertising costs because they now have a bank of high-performing content they can post for free that will do a better job of making people feel like they need to be there than any paid-ad ever could.”

And he shared some stats from Lollapalooza in the U.S. last year, which posted 114 TagMixed clips during the four event days, and experienced a 74% increase in their TikTok following: 141,000 new followers gained during the four days of the festival.

Jenner said, it went to show that TagMix didn’t just amplify the performance content, but could also “significantly grow an event’s online audience, reducing the amount they need to spend to advertise. Lollapalooza’s real-time content strategy, leveraging TagMix, enured that, for every person attending the event, there were fifty others outside its fence engaging with the event on social media and wishing they were there. Is it any surprise that they sold-out of weekend tickets in the fastest time ever last week?”

Ollie Kirk, who heads up marketing and content at 3,500-capacity The Prospect Building, commented, “We’re excited to have TagMix installed at The Prospect Building! In a time when show content is more important than ever, this technology makes a huge difference, allowing us to improve our content quickly and easily, without any extra hassle.”

Andy Dean, CEO and Founder of TagMix, added, “We’re extremely proud that The Prospect Building is the first UK venue to permanently install TagMix. As one of the country’s most progressive new venues, it’s leading the way in how live music is experienced—both in the room and across digital platforms. We look forward to working closely with the team to help accelerate their ambitions to become the most successful venue of its size in the South West.”

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