‘This Business Is A Drug’: Takeaways From Bridge Conference Day 2

Day two of Bridge Conference, which takes place in Umag, Croatia, May 20-22, continued with more discussions centering around the intersection of music and technology.

The first panel of the day, which featured Hannah Joos (Fever), Matthias Strobel (Music Tech Europe), and Vasja Veber (Viberate), talk about ways in which festivals, managers, artists, promoters, and venues can turn data into actionable marketing strategies, ensuring lasting fan engagement and consistent growth.

The day also featured two keynote highlights, one with legendary agent, and ITB co-founder, Barry Dickins, the other with one of Europe’s most prolific promoters, FKP Scorpio founder and CEO, Folkert Koopmans. Both shared fascinating insights into the business of live, which you can only acquire if you’ve earned your stripes over many years in this industry.

Dickins said, today “everybody wants to be an agent, but they aren’t. They’re bookers. Agents used to be [artist] developers. I think, agents that don’t develop artists will struggle. If you’re just picking up the phone to sell your whole tour to Live Nation, what are you doing?”

He also touched on still working at 78, and being able to count the colleagues in the biz that were older than himself on one hand. “It’s a drug,” Dickins said, “the business keeps you young.”

The session “Bridging The World – Operating the music business across the globe” looked at emerging and recently emerged markets. Richard Hörmann, founder of Nucoast, mainly deals in East European markets including Croatia, Slovenia, Bulgaria, Romania etc.

He cited Athens and Sofia, the respective capitals of Greece and Bulgaria, as markets that were dead 10 to 15 years ago, but now had a real live scene going. Others, like Romania, were still lacking a proper live music venue in its capital Bucharest, which was the main reason international tours didn’t year frequent that market.

He named Poland as a fully emerged market, with facilities and an infrastructure that places it among the top three markets for live music in Europe, next to Germany and the Netherlands.

Rabih Hassan Mokbel, CEO and founder of Venture Lifestyle in Lebanon, talked about the exploding markets in the Middle East, led by Dubai in the UAE, and Saudi Arabia. Even Lebanon or Egypt, which are currently considered unstable showed signs of improvement and stabilization.

Some artists still didn’t want to come for political reasons, and Mokbel exemplified this with an example from the 2022 Fifa World Cup in Qatar, where an international artists declined a $25 million offer to perform.

Other local companies, like MDLBEAST were helping open up the country to international talent – and the minds of international talent to performing in the country. Artists were usually offered an exceptionally high fee, much higher than what they’d get anywhere else in the world, to come and perform for the first time. Once they see how well they’re treated, and how big of an audience they have in those markets, it became easier to make them want to return, he explained.

The strength of local talent in emerging markets was addressed, too. Hörman gave Polish artist Sanah as an example, which his company promotes, and who’ll sell 600,000 tickets across two shows at Poland’s PGE Narodowy stadium this summer and another ten stadium shows in 2026.

Or Thompson, a Croatian band, which is going to perform in front of more than 500,000 people at the Hippodrome in Zagreb in July – a ticketed show, making it one of the largest ticketed shows in history.

He also highlighted the strength of local talent by explaining how Barracuda Music more than made up for the international business lost to Live Nation, which entered the Austrian market a few years ago, by focusing on local talent.

Looking into the future, Mokbel said that Dubai was only going to continue to grow. India was described as the “sleeping giant” by Hörman. “Once this market grows up,” he said, “we’ll all have a problem. You could just go there and tour for half a year.”

‘The Magic Of Live Is Very, Very Human’: Takeaways From Bridge Conference Day 1

The day also featured a ticketing panel, exploring what was next in terms of intelligent, technological solutions. Anna Grenzheuser of Fever, talked about ways of making a ticket secure, including making sure tickets cannot be replicated, and ways of personalizing the ticket, if the promoter wants it.

She also highlighted the ways in which a personalized tickets, coupled with cashless technology that’s also part of Fever’s offer to events, can unlock a plethora of revenue opportunities for event organizers, as well as new marketing possibilities.

Emil R. Ljesnjanin, founder and CEO of Tixbase, talked about the fascinating ways in which blockchain technology can help with combating fraud and scalping – including through prorgaming rules into the ticket through smart contracts – fan engagement, ticket-holder identity, and ticket authentication.

Cesare Paciello, VP of events & mobility solutions, at HID Global, talked about the presence and future of access technology, which HID has been providing to some of the biggest sports and music events on earth.

Interestingly, all panelists agreed that facial recognition technology was where the business was headed when it came to ingress on a mass scale.

Day two at Bridge Conference also featured more discussions around AI and how it will – or will not – shape this business going forward. And, just like on day one, agents, artists, and other live professionals speaking on the sessions, agreed that AI couldn’t replace the human spirit, which was so relevant to so many aspects of this business.

One of the speakers on a session dubbed “The Great AI Debate – Who Will Own the Music of Tomorrow?” was Albert Gruber, co-founder of seeqnc, a music recognition and data platform that gives artists, rights holders, and event organizers the tools for copyright compliance and monetization, while unlocking new ways to engage fans.

He summed it up, when he said, “AI is not going to replace you as an artist. A great artist using AI will.”

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