waze, but for when the artist actually comes out

People go to concerts and don't really know when the artist is coming out. Especially in rap, the artists typically come way later. You show up at the door time, you sit through openers you didn't pick, and you have no idea if the headliner is twenty minutes out or two hours out.

So: an app where people click buttons like "the artist came out" and "this is the song they're playing," kinda like Waze. Everyone in the building is already holding a phone. A handful of taps from a few people in the crowd tells everyone else what is actually happening on stage, live.

the incentive

Nobody taps buttons for free, so the incentive has to be real. The idea is to partner with apps like Ticketmaster or whatever and give people loyalty points for reporting. You're already in their ecosystem because you bought the ticket there. Points toward a future ticket, presale access, fee credit, something that costs the platform little and is worth something to a repeat concertgoer.

why I'm not building it

You need a large audience for this to work at all, and marketing it will be hell and impossible. This would be much better for a Ticketmaster or a StubHub to build as a feature than for me to build as an app. They already have the users, they already have the loyalty program, and they already know who bought a ticket to which show.

That is the whole thing, honestly. The idea is fine. The distribution is the product, and I don't have it.

the other limitations

Writing this down properly, the audience problem is not the only one.

The density has to be per show, not overall. Waze works because any given highway has thousands of drivers on it. Here you don't need a lot of users, you need a lot of users at that specific venue on that specific night. A million users spread across the country is worthless if four of them are at the show you're trying to get to.

The incentive and the audience are the same chicken and egg. Ticketmaster won't attach a loyalty program to an app with no users, and the app can't get users without the loyalty program. You can't bootstrap past that from the outside, which is another way of saying the same thing: whoever already owns the loyalty program should build it.

There is almost nothing to do in the app. A Waze hazard sits on the road for hours and every driver behind you needs it. "The artist is on" is one binary event that happens once a night and then the app has no job. Realistically someone opens this a few times a year. That is brutal for retention, and it makes the points economics awkward, because you're paying out for very few sessions per user.

Bad data is easy and hard to filter. People will report the headliner is on to make the floor rush, or sit on it to keep their spot. Waze survives trolling on sheer volume of confirmations. At twelve users in a venue you cannot outvote anyone, and one wrong report sends people sprinting from the bar for nothing.

Venues might actively not want this. Artists running late is often not an accident. Late sets sell bar drinks and merch and build the room. A tool that helps people skip the openers and walk in at the right moment cuts into that, and Ticketmaster's actual customers are the venues and promoters, not the fans. So the partner most able to build it might be the partner least motivated to.

Phones are at their worst exactly when you need them. Cell service in a packed arena is terrible, your hands are full, and you're not pulling out your phone to tag a song in the middle of the set you paid to watch. The moment the data is most valuable is the moment it's hardest to collect.

Some of this already exists, just not live. Setlist.fm has crowdsourced setlists for years. They land after the show instead of during it, which is the real gap, but it means the obvious contributor community is already somewhere else.

what would change my mind

If I already had a large concertgoing audience for some other reason, this becomes a feature I'd ship in a weekend. That's the tell that it's a feature and not a company.

Parking it here so it's written down.