The Event Industry Is Being Confronted By Its Napster Moment

This much we know: connecting people in a business setting will always be a need, in fact may even be more important in a digitally overloaded world, whether through great editorial in a conference setting or through buyer-and-seller matchmaking in various formats.

Zoom is the Napster of the event industry, the ease with which you can put on good-enough virtual events with a global audience, almost for free, much to the undercutting of the underlying economics of the physical events world. All types of business event — conferences, trade shows, conventions — are in danger of their revenues streams of tickets,... See more

Billions of dollars have been sucked out of the industry this year as it is completely shut, and virtual is making up only a tiny fraction of that.

If you think Zoom and virtual event tech today are clunky, think about the Spotify comment I made above: it took 15 years to perfect the software. The current crop of virtual event software companies — most of them new companies, all of them clunky and prone to malfunctioning in live events — are the Musicnet and Pressplay of the event sector (you ... See more

It is important to point out that neither the music nor radio nor the news industry nor the TV/film industry died, its that the incumbent players were simply shunted aside by new companies without the institutional bloat and interests that nearly always keep incumbents from advancing to the next thing.

Many aspects of the industry will likely move to digital formats but the need for physical interaction for the “last mile” may become even more important, even if it becomes a smaller venue where this happens.