According to Statista, live music industry revenue in the United States is on track to reach 11.99 billion USD in 2021 (up from 9.28 billion USD in 2015). But what setbacks could stall this foreseen growth? One of the greatest challenges plaguing the live music industry is a lack of robust data, a problem that live music data company Viberate is perfectly positioned to solve.

On the Viberate platform, entities are organized by event, festival, artist, venue, genre, subgenre, city, and country. Entities are crowdsourced with the help of over 20 thousand contributors, and each and every entry is then curated by a team of 70 full-time database curators.

Viberate also taps into the API's of major ticket vendors, which provide tens of thousands of events daily (contributors can add events manually as well). Artist profiles are also rich with content and always up-to-date, since Viberate sources the content from entities' official sources and enrich the content with metadata.

To date, the Viberate database includes 1/2 million artists, 1/2 million events, 150,000 venues, 5,000 festivals. But it's the success that it is delivering to artists that is the most impressive part of this startup story. But it's the success that it is delivering to artists that is the most impressive part of this startup story. Viberate Co-Founder and COO Vasja Veber joins me on the podcast to discuss how Viberate is solving a major pain point in the live music industry. Vasja tells me how "You can't develop anything using the current data in the live music business. It's just too unstructured. It's also hard to keep the information updated. Standardization is our only way forward."

Viberate aims to standardize and map the entire global ecosystem for live music, becoming something akin to IMDb, a single, verified, and artist-approved source for music information. To accomplish this, the Ljubljana-based startup uses a carefully calibrated mix of crowdsourcing and curation, and blockchain, incentivizing contributors and supporting artist control of assets and information.

"Blockchain has become the long-overdue catalyst for the music industry to update its policy and business models toward music-makers and to provide quick and seamless experiences for anyone involved in creating or interacting with music," notes Viberate advisor, blockchain advocate, and musical innovator Imogen Heap.

"Anything that involves music-makers being independent and having space where they can reach out to anybody who wants to make business directly with them is a really positive thing."

Vasja Veber explains how he and his team are doing for music what IMDb does for the movies.