Coachella Gets Wired, Blogged

Navigating more than 80 bands across five stages in two days amid 50,000 fans is a tall order for anyone attending the annual Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival.

Coachella organizer Goldenvoice envisions helping out with that dilemma. This year, a partnership with Buzznet will allow fans at one stage to use their mobile phones to access photos and fan feedback from concerts at other stages at the same time. The deal is part of a broader strategy for Goldenvoice and other promoters to use blogs to enhance fan interaction before, during and after the event.

"Music festivals are all about community," says Paul Tollett, founding partner of Goldenvoice, "and blogs are a great way for that community to express itself."

Although the festival established a MySpace profile to interact with the 54-plus million registered users of the most popular blog site on the planet, Tollett wanted something unique to Coachella as well.

So he turned to Buzznet, a blog community of about 200,000 members that specializes in multimedia content like photos, videos and mobile. Buzznet built a Coachella-specific online community available only to festival attendees. Once fans buy a ticket, they will receive an e-mail with a unique registration code offering them access to the site.

Buzznet's Coachella community member profiles differ from those on MySpace. Questions skip personal details like marital status that are geared for hookups and instead focus on information specific to the event, such as listing their favorite Coachella artists or years attending the event.

Since fans travel from every state to attend Coachella, Tollett hopes they will post photos, videos and journals of their road trips for other members to follow. And all the site's content can be accessed via tagged links through MySpace and other blogs.

Participating acts are also involved, including Hasidic reggae phenom Matisyahu, who is posting a mobile blog tour diary leading up to Coachella. Tollett says he would like to eventually convince participating acts to use the system already established by Goldenvoice rather than look for their own blogging opportunities.

Whether fans use the blog to meet up at the event is almost irrelevant. "This isn't a hookup site," Tollett says. The point is to experience the festival through the eyes of other fans with whom a geographical or musical connection is shared.

As for the mobile element, anything posted to the Buzznet-powered service can also be accessed via any Internet-enabled mobile phone. This combination of real-time blogging and access-anywhere viewing is expected to bring an even greater element of interactivity to live events, some of which already embrace text-to-screen messaging.

But wireless access may negatively affect the initial experience. Like many festivals, Coachella takes place in an area—a desert—where a strong signal is difficult to find.

Coachella aside, the wireless industry is keenly interested in these sorts of community-driven, multimedia sharing—read: billable—opportunities. Operator Sprint recently launched a new element to its Picture Mail service that lets subscribers create an online community about any subject and invite friends to add pics, videoclips and text to drive multimedia messaging traffic on its networks. And MySpace is working with youth-focused upstart operator Helio to create a mobile extension of its online community.

Meanwhile, Buzznet hopes to create more custom blog services for ongoing tours and other entertainment events. This is the company's first official partnership. At other events, including the annual South by Southwest Music and Media conference in Austin, the company has posted fliers encouraging attendees to upload pics to the Buzznet site for others to view.

Depending on how this first implementation works, Tollett says he may include a custom blog as a standard part of all Goldenvoice events, including Hootenanny and the New Orleans Jazz Fest, and is recommending the experience to other promoters for events like Lollapalooza and Bonnaroo.

"It's a way to make the experience better," Tollett says. "I don't think it's going to help sell another ticket, but it will make you more invested in the event." ••••