Youtility by Jay Baer

Author:Jay Baer
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2013-06-01T16:00:00+00:00

Dan Deacon Turns Fans into Part of the Show

Youtility isn’t all business.

“For the first time, having your phone out at a concert is not a jerk move,” says the description of the official app of Dan Deacon, a Baltimore-based electronic musician known for his engaging live performances. Launched in September 2012 to coincide with Deacon’s new album and tour, the app is available for Apple and Android devices and turns concert-goers’ phones into a synchronized light show, and even into an extra instrument that Deacon can “play” from the stage. A short YouTube video demonstrates the app in action (ar.gy/deacon).

The app has created significant industry chatter for Deacon and the app’s creator, Keith Lea, with articles in Rolling Stone, Billboard, SPIN, CMJ, and more. Writing in Forbes,18 music blogger Leor Galil called the app a natural extension of Deacon’s career-long desire to turn his audiences into a community. According to Galil, Deacon offers his fans a unique concert experience in which the audience is encouraged to participate.

“Controlling a large crowd while trying to engage with it is obviously a difficult obstacle to overcome, which makes the concept of the app so appealing,” Galil writes. “Deacon and company have made an intriguing app that begs attendees interested in having an enjoyable concert experience to toss all distractions and notions of how to act at a show aside in order to use it: It invites anyone with a smartphone to participate in a way that asks very little of the most reserved concert-goers in order to get people to collectively come together in a really powerful way.”

The technology and story behind the genesis of this example of real-time relevancy is remarkable. Says cocreator Lea, “Me and Dan and Alan Reznick, who is also involved with the app, we were all on a bus together. I was running tech and they were both performing on this little tour around the East Coast. . . . I guess Dan had seen the Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremonies and he saw that they handed out LED bracelets and had them sync up. Dan’s idea was why did they bother going through the effort of handing out all of these little LEDs when everybody has, essentially, a little light in their pocket?”19

Lea recalls that, as Deacon’s “nerdiest friends,” he and Reznick were asked about the feasibility of using smartphones in this way, which instigated weekly meetings to work on the project. It turned out to be more difficult than initially imagined.

“You’d think getting a bunch of pretty sophisticated little minicomputers to do something all at once would be easy,” Lea says. “We first thought the obvious thing was to use wifi . . . but we called a couple of networking contractors and just none of them had any ideas because of the need to get five hundred to a thousand people on a wireless network that needs to be torn down and put up every night.”

After abandoning wifi as the syncing technology, the team considered using

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