Bonnaroo’s roughly 85,000 attendees this week will contribute to a crowdsourced documentary, and can automatically brag on Facebook about watching their favorite artists – all part of Facebook and subsidiary Instagram’s exclusive social partnership with the music festival in Manchester, Tennessee, this weekend.
A Facebook spokesperson tells Billboard that every Bonnaroo ticketholder has an RFID chip in their wristband and the option of registering it with Facebook – the leading social networking platform, which averages about 655 million daily active users, and 1.11 billion monthly active users as of March 2013. Scanners at Bonnaroo stages enable participating wristband holders to automatically check-in on Facebook at that stage. The Facebook check-in will include which artist is currently playing on-stage.
“Concerts and weekend-long festivals are all inherently social experiences. Leveraging Facebook to bring people even closer together around music is a natural and necessary step in the evolution of these events,” the Facebook rep said.
For example, at the CMA Music Festival in Nashville June 6-9, promoters encouraged fans to post photos to mobile photo-sharing/social networking app Instagram with the hashtag #cmafest. (Facebook bought Instagram for a reported $1 billion in 2012. Instagram reported having 100 million users in Feb. 2013.) CMA promoters displayed a stream of such tagged photos on their jumbotrons, and roughly 50,000 photos were tagged #cmafest, with artists like Keith Urban, Sheryl Crow, and Lady Antebellum joining in from backstage.
Similarly, Bonnaroo will display artist and fan photos on their big screens and webcasts, and the official crowdsourced Bonnaroo 2013 documentary “True Roo” will feature photos submitted through Instagram that are tagged with #trueroo. Facebook debuted support for linked hashtags within Facebook Wednesday.
“In the past, when people took photos at festivals, they might have only been seen by that person’s friends. Now, through the power of Facebook and Instagram, the live music experience can live on through public conversations already happening on those platforms,” a Facebook rep said.
Additionally, rock photographer Danny Clinch (@dannybones64) will be Instagraming backstage with “unparalleled access” to artists, and will be shooting portraits of them throughout the weekend. Bonnaroo.com webcast watchers will get a feed of Instagram photos from @bonnaroo, and Bonnaroo will be live-updating their Facebook Page as the festival’s primary platform for such content.
“Whether people are at the festival or watching online, they are able to interact with other fans and be part of the concert experience in ways they’ve never been able to before,” Facebook said. [Billboard.biz]
