In today's pulse:

• 🎟️ Sustainability, Diversity, and Innovation in the Music Industry

• 🔍 Small and Personal is the New Big

• 🤖 Is This AI Stuff Overblown?

Read time: 4 minutes

🎟️ Sustainability, Diversity, and Innovation in the Music Industry

Billboard released their 40 under 40 for the music industry and I wanted to share some interesting people and trends from the reporting:

Sustainability: Joe Atamian is a member of Sound Future. The organization is dedicated to bringing emerging climate technologies to live events. This demonstrates the concert industry's growing interest in sustainability, as it seeks to reduce its environmental footprint and leverage emerging technologies for more sustainable practices​.

Diversity: Various executives are featured for working to diversify the music industry. Mari Davies, the VP of talent and booking at Live Nation Urban, is involved in festival curation and has established a new touring department to build their hard-ticket business. She has also curated festivals like the Strength of a Woman Festival and Summit, which was planned by an all-female team, and festivals featuring a diverse range of artists.

Innovation: Brandon Deroche from Propeller, works with artists to partner with nonprofit organizations focused on issues like LGBTQ+ equality, racial justice, climate change, and reproductive rights. It uses an innovative sweepstakes model to incentivize cause-related actions, offering rewards like tickets and merchandise. The platform has reportedly raised over $5 million and driven 8 million actions, signaling the potential for innovative platforms to drive social impact in the music industry​​.

Check out the 40 under 40 list here and share with us what your biggest takeaways are.

🔍 Small and Personal is the New Big

The Experiential Marketing Summit highlighted key trends in the event industry. One significant shift is towards hyper-targeted events, with organizers focusing on smaller, highly impactful gatherings that foster rich, intimate conversations.

Companies like Cisco and Taco Bell have seen success with this approach, creating events for specific audiences that drive stronger engagement.

Budget constraints remain a concern, but some see this as an opportunity to tell compelling stories without massive budgets, and to consider more sustainable solutions.

AI is also emerging as a valuable tool in event planning, with potential applications ranging from design renderings to audience engagement. However, the industry is urged to become early adopters and expert users, as AI will shift the skill set required in the field.

🤖 Is This AI Stuff Overblown?

Pretty much every day there’s an event software announcing that they now have AI capabilities build in. Some of it is pretty cool, but are these tools really that innovative?

Most of them (or all of them) amount to using ChatGPT or some other Large Language Model in their event software interface to help you generate titles, descriptions, or images. It’s helpful, but you could also just hop over to ChatGPT and do this yourself for free (and then have a conversation with it to refine and make it better).

The main strength of the ChatGPT model is that you can refine the results through a “conversation” with the app. Each answer keeps context so you can ask it to take notes and make changes. Usually the first answer is okay, but it gets really good the more feedback you give it.

With that chat functionality stripped out inside of these event softwares. How useful are they?

It also seems like another genuinely useful software would be AI-powered customer support for attendees. Maybe it’s out there already, or you could build your own. But that seems like the biggest short-term opportunity.

What do you think? What would be a truly useful version of AI for events?

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That’s It!

If you have anything interesting you’d like to share, we’d love to hear it! You can respond to this email or send a DM on LinkedIn: Craig Heron.

Thanks for reading, and see you next time!