An Anthropologist and a Data Entrepreneur Want You to Walk into a Bar…

“We’re building an A.I. Ian” said Gary. That will start to make sense very shortly.

He’s talking about Hearby. Along with co-founder Ian Condry, Gary Halliwell has developed something that might just be the most interesting thing in live music that isn’t on a stage.

Gary and Ian are two friends, bound together by a love of live music and Ian’s ability to find out what’s going on in a scene, for over a decade. Together, they’ve driven this forward.

While what they’ve produced is hyper-technological, harnessing A.I., there’s also something comfortingly analogue about the platform, almost like being in an old record shop, but for live music. Scrolling through Netflix-like carousels and Spotify integration may have replaced frantically fingering racks of the latest releases and listening booths, but the joy of discovery- the feeling that you might just find your new favourite band- is exactly the same.

Data driven narratives are emerging from the Hearby A.I.: expensive cities are less well served in terms of venues per head than their cheaper neighbours- begging the question of what the wealthy residents do on a Friday evening. Some of the busiest scenes are in places you’d never expect and places you assumed were once bustling seem to have quietened down in their old age.

It’s all rather fascinating.

We caught up recently, as one does, on videochat.

Andy: Ian, I took a look at the Hearby platform. It’s like I rubbed the music genie lamp and got a wish granted! For the unintitated, what exactly is the Hearby app and site platform?

Ian: “We describe it as an A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) driven live music discovery platform. We basically use A.I. to go and find shows at a massive amount of venues.

Andy: So, you’ve built this awesome platform, but what was the inspiration behind Hearby?

Gary: We set it up because we were frustrated with not being able to find the live music we wanted.

Ian was always doing the research. He does all this work to find out what’s going on and it just seemed like a ridiculous thing in this age of the internet that you couldn’t just search and get a list of shows going on tonight. We realized that no one is providing all of the information and those who are are driven by selling you a ticket. If they’ve not got a ticket to sell you, they’re not going to cover it”.

Ian: “I was frustrated because I knew all this cool stuff was going on out there but I thought there was no way to get the data, then Gary said ‘Oh, we can get the data, but there’s no way of getting it out there’ and I said, ‘Oh, we can get it out there’”.

Andy: So, the A.I. searches the world for these buried live show treasures and organizes them like a curator by genre and such. It’s so difficult to go to event listing sites and uncover new bands. How does the A.I. do this work?

Ian: “Although we’re A.I. driven on the side of the data collection, we really strive to be human driven on the side of curation and the excitement of discovering something for yourself. Instead of an algorithm telling you what you want, we want people to sort through it, choose for themselves and then share it”

Andy: So the Hearby A.I. does this work for you, that’s great.

Ian: Yes, this combination of the very technological and the very human is what makes Hearby work as a platform. It’s an obvious idea, once it’s been spelled out- gather all the data about an area’s music scene and then let people explore it and let others know what they think is worth going to see, but it’s taken the combination of two very different disciplines to work out how to make it a reality.

Andy: So Ian, is this where Gary comes in?

Ian: Yes, Gary is a data entrepreneur. He made his fortune (after what he calls an “eclectic” career) through his last project- NetProspex, a sales and marketing database.

What he loves about the job is the chance to re-shape industries through advances in data technology which he has done in the financial and marketing technology sectors. He decided that his next challenge would be a labour of love- either art or music.

I’m a cultural anthropologist and professor at MIT but my interests revolve around how subcultures on the margins move into the main-stream. I’ve written books on the subject of Japanese hip-hop culture and anime. I’m also the driving force behind MIT’s new spatial sound lab and organized last year’s Dissolve Music festival.

Andy: Getting this off the ground must have been an adventure, so where do the numbers come in?

Gary: “Venture capital didn’t want to hear this idea because there’s a whole graveyard of companies who’ve tried to do this. We looked at them and they all had the same business models- either expecting the consumer to pay, advertising,or ticket sales. We said, ‘No, none of that.’”

Andy: Is this where advertisers come in?

“Advertising is intrusive. We’re not trying to sell you a ticket — we’re trying to find you an experience for you and your friends for the night. We wanted to do something that would have a real impact for artists- if we can get a few more people in the venue then we’ll have helped the local music economy”

Andy: Will the musicians be paying for the service?

Gary: “We don’t want to take a slice. We don’t want to take a cut from the artists. We want to grow the pie- get more people into the music venues- get more opening up, rather than closing down all the time. It seemed that the lack of information was a huge thing holding this back- no one in the community seems to know what’s happening in the community”.

Andy: But where does the money actually come from?

Gary: “The idea is that we’ll take this information and license it, make newspapers, travel companies, hotels, pay for it because this information has value to them.”

Andy: That’s clever. Musicians won’t have to pay, but how does that generate revenue?

Gary: “We went in to have a meeting with the general editor of a major newspaper and they told us every newspaper will want this because it will drive subscriptions and help us retain them, and that a majority of their revenue is from subscriptions- not advertising any longer. This data has real value to these channels that have been unable to access it so far.”

Andy: How does this set Hearby apart from a traditional internet advertising model?

Ian: “The difference between us and those trying to sell advertising, tickets or the app itself, is that they have to lock off their data. They have to draw everybody to them and they can’t share, but our approach is very different- the more people who get this data, the bigger the audience, the more value that it has. The more people who get into a routine of going to see music, the better it is for hotels, streaming, local papers and everybody else”.

Andy: In the midst of a global freeze of live events how does this affect you?

Gary: This might seem an inopportune time to launch a service which revolves around live music- the global pandemic has put an end to shows for the time being, or so the press would have us believe. One of the most fascinating things about Hearby is the data which it gathers and the narratives which play out in the rows and columns of numbers.

Andy: You’re seeing live events return, how is Hearby tracking that?

Gary: Take the example of Nashville- The Music City as it bills itself. In February, Hearby found 2180 shows going on in the city. By June, that was down to 39, even as restrictions were beginning to lift. In September, the number had risen to 795 separate shows. The virus hasn’t gone away, so what has changed?“What we realized we had to do was re-tune the A.I. into the suburban areas. We had been concentrating right in the city centers, but most of that stuff has been wiped out at the moment. So we re-tuned to discover where live music is happening- the suburban restaurants, the pop-ups, and drive-ins.”

Andy: So, it turns out that music never died- it just moved to the ‘burbs and no one knew to look for it there. So to wrap it up, the A.I. acts like your friend who is tuned into the local scene so you can be find a great night out?

Gary: Yes, it’s this combination of the cold, hard data and the human stories that it tells which makes Hearby so interesting. Taking these stories and using them to grow local scenes around the world and with them local economies has to be better than simply trying to flog you a ticket.

Andy: Thank you both for taking the time to speak with us. I’ve downloaded the app and am ready for a series of great nights out in the live scene here and across the U.S (once travel is allowed again).

As of October 2020, Hearby’s database includes more than 12,500 venues. “If we can get even two more people to go to a show at each of these venues, we’re filling a 25,000 person stadium,” noted Ian. “It’s a different approach scale, and we believe it’ll make going out to see music more fun than ever, at least, once it becomes safe again.”

As Gary said; “If we can get a few more people into each venue, Hearby is something worth doing”.