Showscoop: Yelp! For Live Music

Guest post by Eliot Van Buskirk of Evolver.fm.

Showscoop has a new angle on an old problem: Should I spend the time, effort, energy, gasoline, and/or public transit credits to go see so-and-so play live?

To answer that question, it’s tapping “the wisdom of the crowd” with a user-generated database of show reviews. As opposed to Songkick and its ilk, which figure out what music you like then recommend shows, or apps such as Rolling Stone: On The Road, which make you enter the bands you care about in order to see when they’re playing, ShowScoop focuses on something else: Does this artist or band really put on a good show?It’s a good question. Some bands sound great on record, but are unlistenable live. Others (jambands, we’re looking at you) are said to be much, much better in a live setting than they are in their recordings.

The problem ShowScoop is trying to solve is real, but so is the main problem that faces it — namely, how does something like this achieve the scale necessary to be useful in any kind of real way?

When we checked it out last week, ShowScoop had only 47 reviews. Today it has 95, which is still nowhere near enough for it to be useful as a worldwide decider of which bands rule in a live setting, and which ones mostly “fail.”

We asked ShowScoop founder Micah Smurthwaite about how he plans to ramp this thing up, because it really could be useful, and he’s right that nothing else out there does it, from what we can tell. Here’s what he said (the short version is that if you write lots of reviews and make lots of ratings, you might get to go to an epic party):

“You’re right; it needs a large scale. I read a lot of b-school [that's bizspeak for "business school"] case studies about winners and losers of review sites. We learned a lot from Citysearch’s failure and Yelp’s success on reducing costs and driving quality reviews.

Yelp’s Elite Squad is reserved for the most prolific reviewers. Squad members are invited to private parties, (catered by restaurants eager to win the good graces of Yelpers), meet other Yelpers, are given free merchandise, and get a badge on their profile. Even though there are only a few thousand Squad members, they produce about 25 percent of all Yelp reviews, and a Squad member produces 50 more reviews per year than a non-Squad member. (A publicly traded company gets 25 percent of it’s [sic] content from this small group!) Squad status is reevaluated on a yearly basis to verify review production remains constant. They reduce costs by acquiring their most valuable content for free.

Our version of [Yelp's] Elite Squad is the Road Crew. We will provide relevant similar incentives to our Road Crew: We want to throw epic parties too — rent a club in SF, book some artists, and give our Road Crew members a chance to meet… we’ll need more than 47 reviews though.

Our other marketing efforts are more traditional. We’ll go to festivals and pass out a few thousand pairs of branded sunglasses — we’ll be at SSMF (Sunset Strip Music Festival) and FYF (F*ck Yeah Fest) this month. We have 50k followers on Instagram, and we’ll leverage those eyeballs to drive them to the site soon. But we believe driving reviews will come from the Road Crew and hopefully we can find the right incentives for our users.”

The past is littered with products like this that were good ideas, but never took off. This concept might be a better side feature of an app that people already use for live music that has lots of users, such as Songkick, or maybe even a ticketing company like Ticketmaster. However, the odd start-up does eventually bubble up to the top.

Now, it’s up to the music people of the interwebs to decide whether ShowScoop‘s attempt to crowdsource live music reviews will wow crowds — or fail to draw one.