At many museums around the world, visitors’ smartphones are starting to become as central to the cultural experience as the art hanging on the walls, thanks to beacon-based interpretive programming that turns old-school placards into dynamic audio tours. After launching beta tests at four museums last summer, Muzze, a beacon-based audio tour provider based in the Netherlands, quickly grew, and the company has now deployed its system at 40 museums across Europe (mostly in the Netherlands). What makes Muzze (pronounced “muse E” in Dutch) unique, according to co-founder Richard Lagrand, are its software platform, its revenue models and its use of artists to record the tours of their own work.
Users can access audio tours for a multitude of museums from a single application, saving them the hassle of downloading a different app for each museum. Plus, the Muzze app supports five languages: English, French, German, Spanish and Dutch.
A museum that would like to develop an audio tour on Muzze’s platform has two financial models from which to choose.
The subscription option starts at €39 ($60) per month for a starter kit with three beacons and a microphone, which either a museum staffer or the artist whose work is being described can then use to record the tour narration.
Museums that want to charge guests to download the guides can choose Muzze’s 50/50 revenue-sharing option. The revenue is split after subtracting the administrative costs that Muzze is charged when the user pays for access to the audio tour via his or her Apple or Android phone. (Apple’s fees are roughly 30 percent of the purchase price, Lagrand says, while Google charges around 25 percent.)
The system relies on signals received by beacons installed in the space. These signals trigger audio tours, based on a user’s proximity to each beacon, through a mobile app running on the visitor’s cellular phone or tablet. Muzze has thus far only deployed beacons made by Kontakt.io, but is not contractually obliged to do so. “We have a strong preference for Kontakt,” Lagrand states, “because we like their [commissioning] software and they’re a good partner.”
Muzze is also beginning to beta-test the use of push notifications that its clients, regardless of which payment option they’ve chosen, could use to send a user special offers or alerts. Under this scenario, a location-based marketing company would provide the service, with Muzze acting as a broker, and would send location-based advertisements to Muzze app users who have opted in to receive notifications.
Most likely, these notices would be sent to users in order to entice them to visit a nearby museum, but Lagrand says there may be some opportunities for museums to send notifications or offers to users while they’re already inside a museum—though, in such cases, it would likely restrict notices from competing museums. The museum would pay a small per-message fee and receive data showing how many app users took a given action, such as visiting a museum, based on a notification they received when a beacon mounted near the entrance enticed them inside.
Lagrand, whose background is in online marketing and sales, hit on the idea of using beacons at a museum unexpectedly a couple years ago.
“I was between two meetings, and I normally look for a good café with Internet access, but could not find one,” Lagrand explains. “That’s how I ended up in a museum—they had Internet and good coffee. I closed my laptop and glanced up at painting. It was a typical museum—paintings with a nameplate next to them.”
Lagrand realized there was much more information that could be conveyed about that painting, and that digital media could deliver that information. “I blog a bit, so I wrote on the topic of digital innovation in museums,” he recalls. “To prepare, I interviewed museum directors, marketing managers, etc.”
Lagrand visited large, well-known art and science museums, as well as small, niche museums devoted to arcane topics. He even spoke with an 86-year-old retiree and former hospital director who turned his collection of medical instruments into a museum on the first floor of his house.
“I learned there is a clear relationship between the size of the museum and the number of its visitors,” Lagrand says—and, therefore, the amount of resources that small museum directors could devote to interpretive services, such as the conventional audio tours so popular at large museums.
“So I wrote my blog and then the whole thing just sort of sat in my mind,” Lagrand says. “I wondered, ‘Why can’t we do something non-obtrusive for small museums? Can’t we [deliver] similar experience that large museums have?'” That’s when Legrand and his Muzze co-founders began prototyping and developing a beacon-based audio tour platform.
While Muzze initially planned to target its services to small museums, Lagrand says, it found that it needed to rely more on larger museums in order to scale its business. Today, 20 percent of its customers are museums with fewer than 10,000 visitors per month. Seventy percent host between 10,000 and 100,000 visitors per month, while the remaining 10 percent are very large museums with more than 100,000 monthly visitors.
Looking ahead, Lagrand hopes to capture the interests of smaller museums that might see a strong case for advertising on the Muzze app. “If a lot of people download and use Muzze, and there is a concentration of them,” he explains, “we could allow smaller museums to be able to reach out to that audience” based on users’ interests. “For example, if you were in London and went to the Tate and went to a similar museum in Amsterdam, then we know you have a preference for modern art. Then, if you went to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona, and you were later walking down La Rambla [a well-known street in central Barcelona], there is a small modern art museum called Santa Monica. They could do a little campaign and send you a notification as you walk by, with an offer of a reduced entrance fee.”
On average, Lagrand reports, Muzze’s customers have created 15 audio stories (each describing a single work of art or part of an exhibit) and users listen to 11.3 of these stories, on average, with a total of 57 minutes spent using the app per museum visit. Muzze estimates that each app user spends an average of 1.63 minutes in front of each work at an art museum, which indicates that Muzze’s users appear to be highly engaged with the art, based on museum industry statistics indicating that most visitors spend only 15 to 30 seconds in front of a piece of art (when they’re not using an audio tour or accompanied by a docent).
Lagrand does not think Muzze or other beacon-based audio guides will ever displace the use of live docents to interpret art. “With a human guide, you can indicate exactly what you want to know about a given exhibit or period,” he says. But docent tours start to lose their value as the number of tour participants grows, he adds, since a docent cannot offer as much attention to individuals. Moreover, docent programs are costly to museums (even if docents are volunteers, there are administrative costs related to managing, training and scheduling them) and are seldom free to visitors.
In addition, Lagrand says, when the Muzze guide includes narration and insights from the artist him- or herself, it’s difficult to beat.