A couple of weeks ago, I told you about how 500 true fans helped get Tycho his first ever European show by crowd funding a gig. Today I want to tell you about another Detour experiment, this time with Hot Chip. We sat down with Hot Chip and their manager and agent and they got really excited about using Detour to play somewhere new. The management team behind Hot Chip are super experienced and have been working in live music for years. One of the most interesting things they told us is that over the past 10 years, as live music has become more corporate, the routes that bands take have become more predictable and generic. A tour 10 years ago would have taken in more local towns and, in particular, involved more local promoters. They were really excited about the idea of using Detour to play a town they’d otherwise not get to. They were keen to do something right away and had already booked a tour of the UK and Europe, but they had a spare date…
We picked 3 towns they hadn’t headlined before and created a Detour where each of those cities had a chance to create a show on that spare night. We emailed all of the Songkick users in those cities tracking Hot Chip and things started to take off. We wanted to raise 200 pledges to be confident of demand and rapidly all 3 started to get momentum. What happened next though was incredibly exciting. A bunch of superfans in Folkestone decided that they were going to make it happen. As one fan said, “Most bands don’t come to this part of Kent, they tend to stop at London.” They got super proactive and started to email all their friends and even petitioned the local radio station and newspaper. It exploded and went completely viral in a matter of hours through fan to fan word of mouth marketing, Hot Chip sold out. Check out the sales curve of pledges for the show, the huge viral spike is when fans started to self-organise.
This article on Songkick is fascinating and brilliant. Gives me hope that Detour and co could really shake up the standard, staid touring circuits, and get bands in towns where usually overlooked audiences are desperate to see good music. Being from Cornwall, where hardly any bands ever play, makes me hope for this even more.
