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The thrill of star performers and the roar of the crowd are two benefits of operating a live music venue.
But the business side of show business presents challenges. What are best practices, for instance, when scheduling concerts, processing tickets and marketing events?
After tech entrepreneurs Eric Tobias, Scott Kraege and Andrew Davis purchased Broad Ripple’s iconic Vogue six years ago, they learned that venue owners commonly relied on intuition when scheduling shows.
Gut feelings, Tobias said, aren’t favored in the tech sector—where data reigns.
“It struck me as an odd thing to still be doing in 2019,” said Tobias, who serves as Opendate’s CEO.
To bring information into the behind-the-scenes operation, the trio of Tobias, Kraege and Davis partnered with software engineer Adam Darrah and designer Joel Hubartt to launch Opendate as a resource for music venues.
Their Indianapolis-based startup is advertised as an all-in-one platform that offers tools in the three areas of scheduling concerts, processing tickets and marketing events.
A show is scheduled when a deal is struck between a booking agent, who represents the artist, and a talent buyer, who represents the venue.
Opendate’s calendar interface helps a talent buyer keep track of “hold” dates for possible shows as well as the announcement and on-sale dates for scheduled shows.
The software also assists in the search for new events to add to the calendar.
“It makes recommendations on the artists you ought to reach out to, based on routing and what it knows about what’s going on elsewhere in the country,” Tobias said. “If it sees that a band is playing in Chicago and then they’re playing in Buffalo, but they have three dates open, the system knows to flag it.”
As a ticketing company, Opendate is an upstart in a field dominated by Ticketmaster. Live Nation, the world’s largest concert company, acquired Ticketmaster in 2010, and more than 70% of live events use Ticketmaster’s platform, according to Yale University research published in 2022.
Other ticketing companies include Tixr, Eventbrite and Brown Paper Tickets. MOKB Presents, an Indianapolis-based concert company that operates the Hi-Fi and Hi-Fi Annex venues in Fountain Square, sells its tickets through the Tixr platform.
“I think Opendate has a chance to be right behind Ticketmaster in terms of being one of the largest providers of ticketing and software to the music space,” Tobias said. “It’s a space desperate for innovation, and it’s a space that needs someone from the outside to disrupt it. I think we have the team to do it.”
Tobias said Opendate’s ticketing component is built on sharing revenue with client venues.
When a venue sells a ticket, it charges the customer a fee—“the dreaded fees that we all hate paying as fans—and that fee is split between [the venue] and Opendate,” he said.
The third area of expertise for Opendate is marketing. Independent venues typically have modest-size staffs that can use a hand, Tobias said.
“We help the venue post its show to all the social networks,” he said. “We help the venue send automated email and text messages to fans who might be interested in that artist or genre.”
Opendate recently crossed the threshold of 100 client venues, a roster that includes Duke’s Indy in Indianapolis, Buskirk-Chumley Theater in Bloomington and the Beachland Ballroom in Cleveland.
Each month, Opendate hosts a webinar series titled “Make More Money” to explore topics such as “Turning Fans into Lifers: Building a Membership Program” and “Building Resilience: Lessons from Indie Venues in a Volatile Market.”
Tobias said the series is an example of Opendate’s efforts to “level the playing field” between independent venues and Los Angeles-based industry leader Live Nation.
“This is a low-margin business,” he said. “One show can make or break your month or, in some cases, your year. So if you have better information to avoid big swings in the business, that improves your chance of success.”
Opendate is a separate entity from Forty5 Presents LLC, the concert company founded by Vogue owners Tobias, Kraege and Davis. But Forty5 concerts staged at the Vogue, new venue Turntable, Holliday Park and Broad Ripple Park use the Opendate platform.
Although Tobias is a co-founder of High Alpha, the Indianapolis-based venture studio that launches and funds software startups, Opendate was not incubated by High Alpha.
And Opendate isn’t the first software platform to offer schedule management tools to independent venues.
Austin, Texas-based Prism and Brooklyn-based VenuePilot each emerged in 2016. VenuePilot’s client list includes the Cactus Club in Milwaukee and Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa. Prism’s client list includes the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, Tennessee; 9:30 Club in Washington, D.C.; and MOKB Presents in Indianapolis.
Although it’s tempting to consider Forty5 and MOKB Presents as rivals in Indianapolis, Tobias said all independents have a common competitor in Live Nation.
In Indianapolis, Live Nation owns or operates Ruoff Music Center, Everwise Amphitheater at White River State Park and Old National Centre. Tobias said it’s a certainty that Live Nation, which operates more than 150 venues in North America, maintains its own schedule management software.
“The real competitor is the big guy who has all the information and all the money,” he said.•
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