Concert promotion using mobile phones

This article discusses how Fall Out Boy and other bands are using mobile phones to promote themselves and particularly to enhance the concert experience. The assumption is that teenagers want to get messages via phone rather than email.

While the idea of taping into cellphones at concerts makes sense since that's the best way to communicate with audiences during the event, some of the other ideas seem a bit too gimmicky and too youth-specific.

My feeling is that mobile promotions are good when they appeal to audiences' this-concert-is-really-about-me mentality (e.g., allowing them to post messages and photos to giant screens during the show), but don't add much when they are just used as a way to create faux intimacy between a band's promotional department and the fans who sign up. It kind of reminds me of those 900 numbers where you could listen to a photo message from your favorite star for a fee.

Rocky Mountain News, 5/5/07 - Bands SPK 2 GR8 fans:

"• One fan will have the opportunity to go backstage and meet the band via a text-messaging contest held live during the performance.

• The band is encouraging fans to take camera-phone photos during the show and upload them to a section of their Web site called "Thnks Fr Th Mmrs," text-message shorthand for "thanks for the memories" and also the title of their current single.

• In some tour venues, fans will be able to send the photos directly to video screens on either side of the stage, a multimedia upgrade from the now-common practice of displaying audience text messages.

It's all part of a text messaging fan club campaign the group launched in late March. Fall Out Boy developed a set of five mobile trading cards that fans can only receive by signing up for the service and texting in updates on a regular basis. Each time fans text in a message, they receive one randomly selected card. Some are rarer than others, so the odds of getting the rarest card increase with the number of messages sent.

The trading cards are in the form of Tarot cards, designed around graphic themes from the band's new album, Infinity on High. Once downloaded, fans can use them for their phones' wallpaper images.

After joining the text-message fan club, fans will get updates on Fall Out Boy news such as when the band's next video will premiere, ticket alerts for local secret shows, updates about about the band members, and other information - all delivered directly to their mobile phones....

The group uses Mozes to manage its text-messaging efforts; the Palo Alto, Calif., company claims another 700 artists also use its service.

Mozes CEO Dorrian Porter said Fall Out Boy has signed up 'tens of thousands' of fans since the Tarot card promotion began, and recently had the fifth-most subscribers on the service, after Hinder, Korn, hellogoodbye and Boys Like Girls.

Mozes also runs the backstage pass contest at FOB tours. The company first tested the concept last fall with rockers The Plain White T's. For each show, roughly half of those attending responded to the content to get a backstage pass - a staggering response rate.

'It looked like a sea of teenagers pulling out their phones at once,' Porter said....

Concerts offer a variety of ways for bands and fans to interact using mobile phones. Artists already let fans choose which song they should play during their encore via text-message voting. Or they can remix a song played live that night into a custom ring tone available only to those who attended that specific show....

Kevin Lyman, the brains behind the [Vans Warped Tour] alternative rock festival, has already begun integrating wireless alerts into the tour - everything from announcing the day's lineup to giving a heads up on autograph sessions or exclusive backstage acoustic shows. Eventually, he hopes to send concert tickets directly to fans' mobile phones, scanning a bar code on the phone screen like a ticket to get in."