When you see a good concert, you may not realize how much work is happening behind the scenes to bring it all together.
The thing about live event production, however, is that things don't always run as smoothly as they appear. And when the problems do become apparent to everyone — such as when a concert ends up running 40 minutes late — it creates a bad experience not just for the audience, but for the performers and promoters as well.
These problems are often the result of a breakdown in communication — sometimes the result of too many email threads — which Boston rock artist and entrepreneur Jon Ricci is looking to solve with a new cloud-based collaboration and logistics tool called Prechorus. The startup's main purpose is to help promoters, bands, agencies and other stakeholders share "mission-critical information" in a simple way that can save time, money and a lot of headaches.
Ricci told me that the service is launching in beta this spring in partnership with two of the largest events promoters in the United States, Live Nation and AEG Live, which recently acquired Bowery Presents. The two entertainment giants will use Prechorus for events at two venues in the Boston area, Brighton Music Hall and The Sinclair, which they respectively own. Prechorus will also be used for the iHeartMedia Music Summit and the Scars and Stripes Music Festival, both happening this summer, Ricci added.
To get things started, Prechorus has raised a seed financing round for an undisclosed amount from Cambridge venture capital firm Accomplice, as well as a number of unnamed angel investors, Ricci said.
As the lead singer of the rock band Lansdowne, Ricci said he has 10 years of touring experience that helped him understand the major challenges live events producers face. Beyond putting on events for Lansdowne, Ricci has also helped promote local concerts and he served as director of strategic partnerships and innovation for Outside the Box, a performing arts festival in Boston that brings in 400,000 people every year.
One of the largest challenges live event producers face, Ricci said, is managing the large flow of information that is coming in and out of the venue. This includes contact information for the band members and other people on the tour. There's also riders for production and hospitality requirements, schedules for soundcheck and set times, and promotional materials.
"Ultimately you’re talking about countless moving parts," Ricci said, which are often siloed across dozens of disparate email threads, files on cloud services like Dropbox, text messages and phone calls. "If someone missed an email or you send the wrong file, it becomes a big game of telephone," he added.
"We think of ourselves as recession proofing the entertainment industry."
Prechorus aims to consolidate all of that information and communication under one platform and make it easier for anyone working on a live event to get what they need when they need it. This includes a feature called "kit" that lets bands easily send all of their essential information to multiple venues. Those venues, in turn, can automatically apply a band's information to an event listing without having to manually fill in various fields based on what's sent in an email.
The company plans to charge venues an annual subscription fee for Prechorus. Ricci said customers will see a return-in-investment through saved time and a reduction of production delays and errors. Based on an internal study Ricci conducted, he found that Prechorus could help LiveNation reduce its email volume by 90 percent and save more than 36,000 man-hours if the company were to adopt the tool for all of its concerts. The time alone would equate to 17 full-time employees annually.
"The cost is a mere fraction of what is being saved and that can be translated into revenue producing activity," Ricci said.
While Prechorus will focus on the entertainment industry at first, Ricci said the company's service could eventually expand to serve other types of events, including sports events, trade shows and fundraisers. But for now, Ricci is keeping his eye on helping an industry he is intimately familiar with and what is known to be a low-margin business.
"We think of ourselves as recession-proofing the entertainment industry," he said.
