Small Bands & Big Concert Growth

"The great power of digital distribution is that it’s much easier to discover and listen to new bands. Back when we had to hunt down physical albums in stores, our rate of new artist discovery was much, much lower. That means a new band can build a widespread following much more efficiently than back-in-the-day, and can therefore do a world tour a lot earlier in their career, whereas huge, popular acts like U2 and Rolling Stones are already big as ever, and won’t benefit from this additional digital distribution."

Songkick.com has started to comb through its user-generated database of over 1.8 million concerts to pull out some interesting data.  I've been a big fan and user of the site to keep track of shows that I've gone to and be alerted to shows when they get announced so it's great to see them point out some interesting trends.  I agree with their point that widespread digital distribution makes it more efficient for small bands to develop a following and to put on a world tour...but I'm sure the devil's advocate might say that these bands are more affected by the piracy of digital distribution and need to do more shows in order to make up for that lost revenue.  Related to this idea of efficiency, GigsWiz is a service that generates social media analytics for bands to see where their biggest followings are so that they know exactly what cities to play in.  Conversely, the service can also be used by venues to book bands that are popular in their area.  Interesting idea...