The Crowdbuilder: make your audience your headliner

The Crowdbuilder is a tool for audience development that I helped build with Live DMA, the European network for live music associations.

European audiences are changing fast, and many music venues struggle to bring in a new crowd. Audience development is deliberate work, not something that happens automatically. But how do you start? And what can you learn from other venues?

From best practices to a working tool

Since 2017, Live DMA has brought together venue professionals in a dedicated working group on audience development. Studying a long series of best practices, we discovered a pattern underneath most of them: venues operate inside a triangle of audience, artist and setting. If you want to change the audience, you need to change either the artistic programme or the setting (time, location, context) of the event.

That early prototype was called the Try-Angle. Between 2022 and 2024, 17 music venues of all sizes and genres from all over Europe test-drove the tool. Their feedback, experiments and insights turned the prototype into something bigger and better.

The result is the Crowdbuilder: a playful, fill-in-the-gaps format that covers six key topics essential for building your audience and your community. It doesn’t tell you what to do. It helps you discover the strategy that fits your venue, your team and your audience.

It’s multilingual and free to explore at crowdbuilder.eu.

Gather your team, take your time, and work through the six topics together. By the end you’ll have a clear strategy to grow your audience.

Do you have questions about the Crowdbuilder? Get in touch via the contact form.

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Want to keep thinking about audience development, community building and strategic storytelling? I write Impact Stories, an English newsletter for the European culture sector.

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