We had two sections:
- Who's next (we populated a db with every artist from iTunes and last.fm), users could search for an artist and request them to act as a signal as to who was in demand (and where based on user location)
- Crowdfunded show (Self explanatory I hope)
Basically using the who's next data, we approached bands with the concept of a crowdfunded show. If the band agreed to it the crowdfunding actually worked really well for us because the word of mouth generated by the fans was usually off the charts and we'd already seeded it using who's next. However, the problem was always getting the bands to agree to it, the simple truth is no one wants to book a show that might happen in 6 months time, they can't route a tour and make all the finance work with a maybe. Even if they could, the agent, manager or whoever is the decision maker, is rarely open minded to try these sorts of things - 1 in 10 might agree to it, the rest are not interested, as such the crowdfunders don't happen and fans start to doubt the system's ability to actually see results which leads to less fans using the who's next system.
What I soon found was the data from who's next and my own intuition (which is a big part of this tbh) I could usually make a guess which show would be a hit. I was getting cash rich from shows, I could afford the risk that crowdfunding had until then mitigated. I stopped asking the artists to crowdfund and just did standard bookings - we could book more shows and make more money and avoided the headache of trying to get management to do something which was never going to be in their comfort zone.
What I will say is that, my experience shows the data is important. So ask yourself, can you get data which helps promoters know the show will sell X many tickets in Y market? If you can do that, people will want that data for sure and shows will happen, they don't need to be crowdfunded. That's what you should focus on with RoadPony imho. However, I do not believe crowdsourcing is the best way to do it, the reason is because you need seriously statistically significant numbers across multiple locations - it's really hard to do - how are you going to let people know about your platform to crowdsource in the first place? Attracting users is real tough. Are you confident people will believe it in enough to bother signing up and then listing all their favourite artists? Even then, SongKick (who already had a massive audience who had listed artists they wanted to be reminded about if they came to their town) had a fantastic starting data set, and they could not make Detour work.. I think that tells you a lot about the size you would have to get to to get the data you need.
I would think more about the data itself, are there other networks, facebook likes, locations of twitter mentions, shazams, etc that can be used to build a picture of where artists have an audience. That data could have value to promoters / artists and help guide their booking decisions. Think https://www.chartmetric.com/ for live music.
Still I should qualify, that promoters are a funny bunch, they often book things more for vanity and they have their own methods of deciding how they book what - some will be resistant even if the data tells them to do something else. I remember the CEO at one of the biggest Asian promotion companies told me "We decide what's cool in Asia". Still, I think if you are able to get solid reliable data, that gets results you can force people to pay attention to you.