Google’s Area 120 Shutting Down ‘Demand’ — A Live Music Data Analytics Platform

In recent news, Google’s Area 120 announced that it’s shutting down Demand — a data analytics platform to provide actionable insights to artists, venue managers, promoters, and others in the live music industry — on November 20th.

In its official email, Google’s Area 120 stated that “Although we’re extremely proud of what we have built, we have decided to discontinue the project. We are so grateful that you signed up to be a user, and we hope you enjoyed what we created, even if for a short time.”

This data analytics platform debuted just before the COVID pandemic lockdowns, but now Area 120 decided to no more invest in such incubator projects. Hyperlocal social network Shoelace was another incubator project which was shut down for similar reasons; however, it ended up launching Fundo in September for hosting and ticketing virtual events.

According to the Area 120 team, the analytics platform — Demand came with some significant aspects. Artist Trends, which allowed users to see Google Trends and YouTube Views data for more than 19,000 artists. Along with that, it also showcased ticket pricing to identify the historical and real-time pricing data for the primary and secondary ticket markets. Announcement Effectiveness, which allows you to see real-time activity for an artist’s on-sale announcements. And, audience insights to set up-to-date insights about an artist’s audience.

Know more about Demand here.

It was primarily powered by Google Trends data, which then leverages YouTube and Google Play data as a “barometer for sustained interest in an artist over time.” Post that, the third-party data sources then provide historical and current pricing. 

The goal of this platform was to “enhance the planning, pricing, marketing and sponsorship of live events,” while also improving the fan experience by expanding the reach. 

However, the recent shutting down might impact the users and artists already enrolled on the platform. Similar to shutting down processes of its other incubator projects like Shoelace, Google’s Area 120 is expected to come up with a detailed explanation of the same with information on what you can expect for an active user.

Since its inception, Google’s Area 120 incubator projects have been a testing bed of innovation and penetrating areas that it has not visited before. The industry hopes to see more projects like these down the line continuing the development and experimentation.

Read more about it here.