Ticketfly

by Ticketfly Founder and CEO, Andrew Dreskin

I was pretty broken up to hear that Adam Yauch passed away last week. The first time I came across the Beastie Boys was in 1986 when I was 17 years old. They opened up for Run DMC at a sweet sixteen that I attended at a home on Long Island. Yes, you heard me, a sweet sixteen! They had barely released Licensed to Ill at the time and if memory serves, Fight For Your Right hadn’t yet overtaken the airwaves. The Beasties were unlike anything I’d seen before. I remember them – probably 20 years old, clad in jeans, gold chains and baseball hats – hitting on middle-aged women in ball gowns at the bar. And the topper to the evening was when the mother of the girl for whom the party was being thrown found the Beasties rifling through the drawers in her bedroom. They got thrown out of the party.

Like most music fans growing up in 80s and 90s, I fell in love with the Beastie Boys. I went to see them more times than I can remember. I reviewed one of their concerts – at the UNO Lakefront Arena in New Orleans – during the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival for the seminal online music magazine Addicted to Noise. I saw the Beasties at Lollapalooza at Downing Stadium in New York City in 1994. That was one of my favorite Lolla lineups: The Smashing Pumpkins, Beastie Boys, George Clinton & the P-Funk All Stars, The Breeders, A Tribe Called Quest, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, L7 and a new band called Green Day. I went back to Downing Stadium to see Adam Yauch’s Tibetan Freedom Concert in 1997. The lineup was ridiculous: Beastie Boys, Foo Fighters, U2, Sonic Youth, Patti Smith, The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Radiohead, A Tribe Called Quest, Rancid, Björk, Pavement, Blur, Michael Stipe & Mike Mills, Eddie Vedder & Mike McCready, Porno for Pyros, and Lee Scratch Perry were some of the acts that played that day. Free Tibet was a cause I could get behind and it gave me a new appreciation for Adam Yauch. It was clear that these guys had changed a lot from the first time I saw them.

After I sold TicketWeb I moved back to New York and dreamed up my next idea.  The East Coast needed a European-style rock festival, so I founded the Field Day Music & Arts Festival. Field Day is a long story for another time, but what I can say is that from the get-go I knew only two bands could help me get Field Day off the ground: Radiohead and the Beastie Boys. Who better to help launch a massive New York-based music festival than the Beastie Boys? So I made the pitch to the Beasties agent and management and even though they weren’t touring, they said yes. They got it. The festival didn’t exactly go as planned, but the Beasties acted with grace and aplomb in the face of a somewhat dodgy situation, which I think says a lot about them.

Years later, along with Seth Hurwitz of the 9:30 Club and Merriweather Post Pavilion, I founded the Virgin Mobile Festival. In 2007, we were fortunate to have the Beasties play at Virgin. They were amazing as always. One of the highlights of my career was watching the Beasties play on the main stage before The Police. We were told at the time that the Beasties were pretty fired up to be playing before The Police, of whom they were fans. I remember my son, who was 2 years old at the time, rocking out to the Beasties. It made a father proud.

For the past ten years I lived in lower Manhattan. On occasion I used to see Adam Yauch tooling around the City. I will miss those days.

by Amy Miller, Community Manager

Have you called us lately? Why not? You never call anymore. And you should. Because we have some of the coolest hold music in town. It won’t make you want to tear your hair out, and it won’t make you wish you had stuck with those oboe lessons in high school. We have the good fortune of employing a lot of performers at the ‘Fly, (including 11 guitar players, 8 drummers, and 3 stand-up comics!) and we like to showcase this bevy of in-house talent when we can. (Yes, of course we still pay them licensing rights!)

This video about Ticketfly features the works of PARENTZ, a one man operation out of Oakland, CA. Jeremy Sullivan has been making beats since the ripe old age of 12. The featured track is called Big. We use it in several videos, and it’s what you hear if you call our friendly Support team, where sometimes you even get to chat with Jeremy himself! Big is a throwback song that references the care-free, feel-good arrangements of the 80s while mixing in modern electronic sounds and production. Hear more of PARENTZ over on their label page or hear below about how he was inspired by the TV show The Heights, AKA one of the best shows of all time.

Hey promoters! Courtesy of the Icelandic pop band Of Monsters and Men, here’s an awesome idea for getting your fans to interact with your Facebook page post-show. And it seems to be working. They have over 100K Facebook friends and over 13K fans talking about them this week alone.

Snap a photo of the crowd during a show and create a post the following day encouraging people to tag their own happy faces. It will get your Page more fans as they share the photo and it makes them feel like you care that they showed up! Love it. I guess all those Omega-3s are good for creativity. This was an attempt at a fish joke. Sorry, Iceland, it’s Friday.

by Amy Miller, Community Manager

This year, the demand for Coachella tickets was so high, they decided to spread it over two weekends. We can see why, with a stellar line-up that includes The Black Keys and Dr. Dre and Snoop, as well as the long-awaited Coachella return of Radiohead. But in the scramble for tickets, some of us still came up High and Dry.

The good news is that Coachella bands are on the move. And when they emerge at the end of April from the cloud of desert dust and drug hazes, they’ll likely be in your town. Below are our favorite Coachella bands on sale on Ticketfly.

St. Vincent Former Polyphonic Spree-ette with a dreamy voice and a face to match. The Oklahoma native and Berklee College grad makes her on-stage shredding seem downright sweet. You’ll walk away in love and only slightly worried about her. Show dates Follow @st_vincent tUnE-yArDs Did we get that capitalization right? With a nearly flawless album mixed by Oakland’s favorite engineer Eli Crews, this lady’s energy is better consumed in an air-conditioned room. Show dates Follow @tuneyards GROUPLOVE Although you might miss out on a lot of the actual group love that tends to happen at Coachella, these guys are touring like crazy. You might recognize their catchy melodies from Apple ads, the modern pinnacle of the indie rock distro chain. They’re adorable and their music is a party you wanna be invited to. Show dates Follow @GROUPLOVE A$AP Rocky A$AP Rocky was the talk of the town during SXSW and not just for the fights he was getting into. Harlem’s current hip-hop wunderkind started rapping at 8 yrs old. He’s collaborated with Drake and already inked a deal with Sony. See him in a small venue while you can. Show dates Follow @ASAPMOB The Black Angels If there’s a town that knows how to produce some psychedelic rock, it’s Austin. The Black Angels’ name is a Velvet Underground shout-out and you can hear the fandom in their guitars. OK, so this is probably one that would be better on the sweaty drunken ground at Coachella. But it’s sold out, dawg. I told you already. Show dates Follow @_theblackangels Housse de Racket The word is that this Parisian pair got their start as session musicians for Phoenix and Air and you can certainly hear it in their synthy poppy French goodness. Show dates Follow @houssederacket. They Tweet in English. Beats Antique Something for all of your senses, this electronic gang is also known for their tribal dancing, performance art and their incorporation of so many different sounds, including afro-beat, hip-hop and jazz. It’s the kind of sound and style that could only come out of (yep) San Francisco. Show dates Follow @beatsantique