If you ask any band or musical artist about the most frustrating and challenging part of being a performer, their answer likely won’t be about writing songs, practicing, or even branding and marketing themselves.
They’ll probably say finding and booking shows.
For any upstart band or artist, it can feel nearly impossible to break through the noise and finally get yourself onto the right stages and in front of the right audiences, and for venues and bookers, it can be just as tough to find the best artists to fill a room or to fill out a bill.
Enter Fanwave, a new Oklahoma-born app and platform that seeks to bridge the gaps between artists, venues, and fans.
It’s the brainchild of OKC-based programmer, startup founder, and onetime working guitarist Tanner Smith, who developed Fanwave after not only living and experiencing those same difficulties in his former band for years, but after continuing to hear about the same issues stifling young bands even now.
Tanner Smith: I started talking with bands and talking to them about what they want to see, what tools don't exist out there. And they said they had the hardest time trying to find artists that match their vibe or their size in other states and other regions.
Brett Fieldcamp: Often the most effective way for an independent band or artist to book a local show or a tour is to link up with similarly styled or comparably sized acts and to reach out directly to venues with a clear picture of how a bill would go over in their space.
So Smith decided to leverage his background in coding and startups alongside his own knowledge of the music scene to find a better way to do just that.
Tanner Smith: If you can track your progress over time, if bands would just track that, they'd get better shows. If they would stop going on premature tours, they would get better shows, and they would stop breaking up.
And that, to me, was the biggest thing, like, education to help other artists and bands, like, make it bigger, and then also, at the same time, helping the fans find the shows.
Brett Fieldcamp: He determined that the answer could be an interactive platform that would allow bands, fans, and bookers to all track shows and concerts in their cities, and to log things like their sounds, styles, and audience numbers and experiences in real time, rather than relying on deceptive data like streaming numbers or the inflated and misleading metrics of social media.
Tanner Smith: We didn't want to do social media because we don't like vanity metrics. We don't think likes and follows and showing that off is conducive to a healthy environment.
Having the profile be “it is what it is,” “you're here.” You don't see the listens. You don't see anything. That level of, like, anonymity is helpful because it keeps the band focused. It helps keep the artist focused. The metrics themselves are coming from the shows, right? So you'll never be able to see how many follows you have, because we don't want you to chase that.
We want you to write the music, we want you to play the shows, and we want you to see how you're growing
Brett Fieldcamp: That mindset of encouraging artists to focus on their music rather than on their numbers and clicks may be unexpected from someone that originally graduated with a degree in music business from Southern Nazarene University and that moved to Nashville for a time looking to break into the business side of the music industry.
Instead, Smith was met with a series of shutting doors and an eventual harsh realization.
Tanner Smith: I can't make money with my music business degree, right? I have gone from graduating with a music business degree and moved and I was in Nashville for six months.
I tried to get in with A&R, tried to get in with, like, any type of recording studio or music business business, right?
And everything is just like everybody's been there for 30 years. They don't want to give up their jobs, because it's such a cool job, right? So there's not a lot of jobs in the market for that side of things. And I was like, Okay, I need a backup plan.
Brett Fieldcamp: That backup plan would lead him to break into coding and development and eventually back to the Oklahoma music scene with a new and better idea of how to support artists in a rapidly changing and increasingly data-driven world.
Fanwave is the result of that idea, an app that allows artists and bands to create profiles, fans to log their presence and experiences at shows, and venues to view the data generated to see and understand how fans are interacting with acts and what’s actually bringing audiences out in real time.
And at least for the artists and the fans, it’s all free.
Tanner Smith: We have no subscription fee for the artists. Our subscription fee is for the venue to be provided that fan data, and we actually take half of what we get back from that small fee, and we give it back to Allied Arts.
So that's to show that we're giving back to community, and we want to continue to grow our community, because there is a way to navigate the business world without stepping on necks, right? You can do it out of care for the community. You can have empathy.
You can still find great success through being genuine, because without an arts community, you have nothing.
Brett Fieldcamp: Performing artists, live music fans, and venue managers can all find Fanwave right now in mobile app stores and on the web at fanwave.io.
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