Part 1: The benefits of the Internet

Alex, when people talk of the Internet and business, they normally mean websites. But how has the Internet per se helped Jazz Pub Wiesen?
The simple answer is that it's helped enormously. But it's difficult to quantify.

Email has had a tremendous impact of course, making international communication so much easier. You could say email has more or less made the fax obsolete. It's easier, quicker and goes direct to the person intended, which means it's also more reliable. It's made talking to agents easier, as we can now send out the same request to different agents with one email. And this works the other way of course; it's much easier for agents to send out information to promoters.

Email has also helped my communication and PR work. A lot of the communication work we were forced to outsource can now be done in-house and cost-effectively, thanks to email. We have, for example, around 1,500 opt-in subscribers to our email newsletter. When you consider our venue holds a maximum of 8,000 people, that's an excellent number of potential festival-goers that we can now talk to directly online.

Of course, email hasn't replaced the fax completely - there are still plenty of "roots" people.

"Roots" people?
Yes, as in "back to the roots"; people who may be a little older and have never got to grips with computers, who are happy just to be able to work out how to use a fax, where they can still send handwritten messages. Understandably they are reluctant to use email, and once they've got the hang of sending emails, it's another hurdle to get them to handle attachments. So the fax will be with us for a while yet.

And what about the web?
The web is a great information resource for us. We can get information quickly and easily about business partners and contacts, or about the bands. If I'm writing biographies or press material, and a band isn't with a publishing giant like Universal, then I'll often have to look up profiles and discographies myself - and the Internet is very useful for that kind of research.

The Internet stands to have a huge impact on the way music is delivered and sold. Are there any ramifications for live music events like yours, particularly in terms of industry structures?
Not really, no. The Internet has made the whole process easier, but the tasks performed by each part of the industry - the structures - remain unchanged. There's still this chain, where we talk to an agent, who talks to the band manager, who talks to the band. The Internet doesn't suddenly enable us to go direct to the musician, for example, or at least no more than we could have done before.

The Web does give smaller, less-known bands a chance to reach a wider audience and build a better media presence. But this shouldn't be overvalued. I can't think of any example of a band that has gone from nobodies to world stars just because they had a good homepage - they still have to work through the existing structure.

Looking now at Wiesen Web, what were the thoughts behind having a website?
Initially, we put up the website simply as an additional service for our visitors - as an information resource dealing with things like how to get to the festival site, which bands are playing, etc. Then we recognized fairly quickly how it could be used to build customer loyalty, to increase our brand awareness.

The site isn't there to make money in itself, but to support the relationship between us and our customers. This is especially important in winter - having a website keeps us top of mind until the festival season begins again.

But you do sell tickets online?
Yes, but the prime objective is still to provide an additional service and benefit to customers, rather than to earn money from ticket sales via the Web per se.

How do you sell the online tickets?
There are two alternatives - you can buy tickets through a central form, or direct from the information page for each festival through a Quickticket system. Basically, when an order form is submitted we receive an email with the details. We then confirm the order manually by email and send the tickets to the customer within a few working days. The customer pays on delivery - we sell all our online tickets like this. The Austrian post delivers the tickets and collects a fee from the purchaser for the delivery and also collects the money we're owed.

Continued...