For the past several years, there has been a lively debate around Boston centered around how to get more people into live music venues and attending shows. One Somerville start-up thinks it has a potential solution to the issue, and it involves having concertgoers select the bands themselves by voting on who plays.
Vote The Lineup, which launched last week and hosts its inaugural show October 13 at ONCE Ballroom in Somerville, provides a simple premise: Those who purchase a ticket to a Vote The Lineup show are given nine options for performers, and those nine options are slotted into three separate categories (headliner, 1st opener, and 2nd opener). After someone buys a ticket online, they can enter a passcode to hear the bands and cast their vote. Roughly two weeks before the show takes place, the votes are tallied, and the bill is finalized.
“This came about as I was curious if there was a way in which we could connect both the digital and live music scenes,” says Vote The Lineup founder Andrew Saltzman. “How do we get people to check out the artists they are going to see and are unfamiliar with? That led to the crowdsourcing idea of having them actually determine the acts.”
The October 13 launch, which has an $18 cover, allows ticket-buyers the option to choose between Juice, Plums, and Ed Balloon as the headliner; Latrell James, Tourist Season, and Chameleon Culture vie for 1st opener; and Teenender, TRY, and Split/Halves are battling for 2nd opener duties.
Saltzman says it taps into people’s interest in curation and it breaks down a barrier that has long existed between promoters and music fans.
“I definitely see it as a new way to book shows,” he adds. “Historically, all of the decisions for booking artists has been between the venue/promoter/artist/artist mgmt. The system has never allowed the crowd to directly influence these decisions, and I truly believe there is a thirst for that power. The end goal is to integrate Vote The Lineup within ticketing systems so the user can determine a slot in a festival, the opener of a show, or the show in its entirety.”
And if more people are discussing shows via Vote The Lineup, it’ll bring awareness to not just three bands playing a show on any given night, but nine. Tourist Season, for example, might not win that 1st Opener slot for October’s launch, but this mechanism is a way for them to get their name out and music heard through a show they might not even be playing.
“There is a ton of potential mainstream talent out there in a city like Boston; but it is scattered, backed only by friends and family, and lumped together with niche markets,” Saltzman says. “If we take all of the artists that could appear at a festival like a Coachella and Lollapalooza and package it in an inviting platform like Vote The Lineup, we can engage a larger market to their music community.”
Poster for the launch show is below.
