Why Hasn’t Superglued Concert Community Achieved Critical Mass?

Superglued is a community built around the music concert-going experience. It's a nice looking site with an interesting concept that includes rewarding its users for their activity both on and offsite. Yet the membership is relatively small reminding us that "build it and they will come" is never a guarantee.

I talked to Superglued cofounder Rush Doshi this week and he gave me a sense of the history and perspective behind the project which launched in 2009. Initially there was a focus on folks connecting to do something after they attended a concert, which is an interesting idea (AfterParty App?), and has grown to focus on everything related to a concert from finding shows to sharing content from the concert.

Superglued looks good. It has native iPhone and Android apps with a mobile web site in the works. You can link your account to a number of social networks and media sites, such as YouTube and Twitter, and have content posted there appear on your Superglued account.

They've also gotten a lot of great press, including multiple appearances in Mashable, and they've been running a bunch of fun contests like this one with MTV Hive featuring a VIP trip to Moogest2011.

Yet when you check out the number of registered members in different locations, you find that outside of the New York area, most major cities have no more than about 100 members.

Part of the problem is clearly an excessive focus on New York, as indicated by the home page which, at this moment, features only pics of concerts happening in New York. So reaching out to other areas more aggressively is definitely needed.

There's a lot of content on the site and you can access much of it without registering, like this previous contest for the Pearl Jam 20 tour, yet I don't think I would have found this browsing the site on my own. So there's a lot they could do with surfacing content from past events including, for example, the fan videos for PJ20 that contestants posted on YouTube which I'm not finding on the site.

Also, if you look at the press page, you can see that most of what's featured are links to industry oriented pubs. Mashable probably has the biggest popular audience yet it's tech focused. Where's the music press and blogger coverage? That absence might be a big part of what's happening as well.

I'd love to get some productive reader comments on Superglued and how they might break out to another level and leverage their considerable assets and business relationships. Are we just so saturated with social media that niche sites can't make it or is there a thriving future for Superglued?

Hypebot contributor Clyde Smith is a freelance writer and blogger. He is currently relaunching Flux Research to pursue his long-standing obsession with web business models. To suggest music services and related topics for review at Hypebot, please contact: clyde(at)fluxresearch(dot)com.