Las Vegas Sun

March 19, 2024

Brooklyn Bowl owner’s social network aims at the biggest fans of live music

Peter Shapiro

Mark Abramson / The New York Times

Peter Shapiro, an independent concert promoter and entrepreneur who is developing an online social network focused on live music called Fans.com, inside his Brooklyn Bowl venue in New York, Aug. 18, 2016. Fans.com will let users build profiles based on concerts they have attended and communicate with like-minded people via news feeds.

You post family updates on Facebook, news on Twitter, selfies on Instagram and career changes on LinkedIn. Do you really need another social network?

Peter Shapiro, the man behind Brooklyn Bowl and last year’s Grateful Dead reunion, thinks you do — one that shows all the ways you are a fan.

Shapiro, 43, one of the most successful and least button-down independent music promoters in the country, is introducing his latest venture this week, an online platform called Fans.com that lets users build profiles based on concerts they have attended and communicate with like-minded people via news feeds.

If the format sounds familiar, it is no accident. But Shapiro’s bet with Fans.com is that other social networks are ill-suited as platforms to express the effusive passions people have for music, sports and other kinds of entertainment.

“There is no platform for being a fan,” he said. “Facebook was meant to be a connector to friends and family. But if you are a Slayer fan, you might not want to post about that, if you work at Chase Bank or if your grandma is on your Facebook page.”

For more than two years, Shapiro has been quietly developing Fans.com with a team of 10, including Seth Schiesel, a former reporter and critic for The New York Times who, like Shapiro, is a die-hard jam-band fan. (Schiesel said that Shapiro first told him of his idea before a Phish show at Madison Square Garden on Dec. 29, 2011.)

The site’s core is a database of 5 million concerts going back decades. Users can tag individual shows they have attended, and post media and links to a feed connected to each artist or event. The site will make its public debut Thursday with live video feeds from Lockn’, Shapiro’s four-day festival in Arrington, Virginia, featuring Phish, My Morning Jacket and Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead.

For now, Fans.com is a rudimentary database of concert listings. But Shapiro wants to expand it into sports and other areas. He also views it as a potential marketing tool that can be used by artists and promoters to target their most engaged listeners by tracking the data that users submit about how many concerts they have attended and where.

As a promoter, Shapiro said, he does not know whether people who have liked an artist’s Facebook page are likely ticket buyers, but those who say they have bought tickets are a safer bet.

“If I knew who those fans were, that’s a game changer,” he said.

Shapiro began his career 20 years ago when he took over the Lower Manhattan club Wetlands Preserve, a hub for the jam-band scene, which closed in 2001 as neighborhood rents began to skyrocket. Over the years he has built a mini-empire of music and media, with Brooklyn Bowl — which opened in Williamsburg in 2009 and is now in Las Vegas and London — as well as Lockn’, the Capitol Theater in Port Chester, New York, and Relix magazine.

Last year, he and a partner, Madison House, promoted the surviving members of the Grateful Dead in a series of concerts called “Fare Thee Well” in Chicago and Santa Clara, California, that sold $52 million in tickets, making the event an enormous success. (By comparison, the two weekends of Coachella, with dozens of bands, sold $84 million in tickets that year.)

Shapiro said the investment in Fans.com stood at “several million” dollars, supplied by his company, Dayglo Ventures — the holding company for Fans.com and Shapiro’s other properties — and a handful of others, including Roger McNamee, a Silicon Valley investor, and Wonderful Union, a company that runs fan websites for stars like Taylor Swift and Drake.

Shapiro was quick to acknowledge the challenges that Fans.com faces against gigantic social networks like Facebook, which has 1.7 billion users around the world. McNamee, who helped found Elevation Partners and was an early investor in Facebook, was no less candid, but said that for Fans.com to succeed, it only had to focus on the needs of music enthusiasts.

“It need not be like Twitter or Facebook to please everyone involved,” McNamee said. “It only needs to make the lives of fans better. And that is something that Peter Shapiro can do.”

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