Germany’s Reeperbahn Festival is not your typical music fest, filled with partiers looking for good music and good times. Rather, it’s where thousands of music industry professionals go to work (while having fun). And a new beacon-based tracking system, deployed at last year’s event, helped them do just that, according to the festival’s organizers and the mobile app developer that launched the system.
The Hamburg event, which will mark its 10th year in September, is both a music festival and a conference featuring more than 200 sessions, networking events, meetings, showcases and award shows. Greencopper, a Montreal-based mobile app developer, created a tool called Logbook for the Reeperbahn mobile app a few years ago, which serves as a digital guide for the many events and concerts that take place across 70 different venues throughout the city. It also provides Reeperbahn attendees with background information and video regarding the artists performing at the festival.
Prior to 2014, attendees could use the app to create playlists of the artists performing at the festival. This was made possible through a recommendation engine in the Logbook that matches a user’s musical interests by accessing (with permission) his or her Facebook and/or Spotify accounts. The festival includes many showcase events, the objective of which is to feature as many bands as possible, with each band playing a short set. These showcases are a big draw for the many booking agents who attend the festival expressly to find up-and-coming musicians whom they might want to book for clubs or concert venues.
“Each showcase lasts for about 45 minutes,” says Gwenaël Le Bodic, Greencopper’s CEO. “The bookers are looking to hear as many bands as possible, and you start to lose track of what you’re seeing.” So to make it easier for bookers and other attendees to keep track of the bands they hear at the event, Greencopper outfitted the showcase venues with beacons, made by Kontakt.io, for the 2015 Reeperbahn Festival, which took place last September.
Le Bodic explains that Greencopper updated the Logbook so that when a user entered a venue, his or her phone would receive a ping from the beacons. Based on this signal, Logbook would keep a record of the venue’s name, as well as the date and time, and would continue logging this data for the entire duration of that person’s attendance at that venue. As it logged this data, the app would generate a list of the bands playing in that venue during the attendee’s visit. Then, through integration with Spotify, the guest could later access a playlist containing the two most popular tracks of each band that he or she heard while moving through the showcase events.
It may seem odd that attendees would have trouble recalling which bands they’ve seen, says Ramona Kappmeyer, Reeperbahn Festival’s head of communications, but “bookers might attend each band for 10 minutes.” With Logbook automatically generating a playlist, she says, individuals could move from one venue to the next very quickly without worrying about stopping to take notes or jot down the names of the bands as they see them.
Based on statistics that Greencopper shared, the beacon-based feature seemed to be well received. During the 2015 event, 62 percent of all festival attendees used the Reeperbahn app, up from 54 percent in 2014. What’s more, guests listened to 30.7 tracks through the Spotify integration last year—about twice as many tracks as they listened to in 2014.
But deploying the technology had its hurdles, Le Bodic says, which he attributes to concerns that Germans tend to have about preserving personal privacy. “We had some cases where venue owners did not want us to install beacons, just based on their concerns [regarding the privacy of attendees],” he states. “In some instances, it took us more time to explain to them how it would work, and to convince them that we were not collecting data on attendees, than it took to actually install the beacons.”
Le Bodic and Kappmeyer say they also had to keep reminding users, through the Logbook app and via messaging at the festival, to turn on their phones’ Bluetooth radios, to enable the playlist function to work.
“In Germany, in general, it’s not that common to have [your phone’s] BLE radio switched on all the time,” Kappmeyer explains.