EpicMix
Badges.
Dedicated readers will remember my meeting with Shawn Fanning at Quincy Jones’s house, wherein he spoke about making music a game, enabling fans to unlock status achievements like in video games and use their acquisition to become members of the club, to brag to fans.
What kind of crazy fucked up world do we live in where a resort company utilizes this concept before a music company?
I’ll make this simple. Live Nation should have an app. AEG too. The big indie concert promoters, JAM and IMP, also.
You download it and you find out which of your friends are going to the gig. And once you get to the gig, it shows you which friends are there, and where they’re located in the venue.
It gets even better. Your app is your ticket. Yes, you use your smartphone to get in. And if you want to resell that ticket, you do it through the promoter’s Website, like they do in sports.
And when you go to the show, when you earn your achievement, you unlock your badge and it’s instantly pushed to Facebook so all your friends can see. And a status update is pushed to Twitter. Sure, you can turn these features off, but who’d want to?
Go to five concerts and you unlock a special ConcertGoer badge. Go to five concerts of the same act and you unlock a SuperFan button. Hell, there can be competition online as to who is the biggest fan of GaGa, Phish, DMB, EVERYBODY! Who’s gone to the most shows!
And each band can have its own badge. Possibly created by Shepard Fairey or another hip designer. So you can accumulate a plethora of them to display on your Facebook page. But the only way you can unlock the badge is by buying something. Oh, you don’t have to buy anything, but you want to, to celebrate and demonstrate your fandom!
This technology is not futuristic. This technology is here today. But only innovative companies are using it. Used to be the music industry was the most innovative on the planet, cutting edge, where all the breakthroughs took place. Now it’s a greedy enterprise trying to lock people into consuming the way they always did, ensuring big dollars to the usual suspects. But the public hates the usual suspects.
And many people want to hate Vail Resorts.
But how can you hate them when they come up with EpicMix? Making your skiing experience even richer at no additional cost! Yes, it costs nothing to get a Peaks card and play.
Watch this video, think of the possibilities.
And know that Vail Resorts has refocused its marketing efforts online. That’s where the action is today. Following Rob Katz, the company’s CEO, on Twitter, I knew they were up to something, he said today was launch day. But I didn’t expect his product to be this good!
And I’m disappointed there’s no BlackBerry app. Yes, it’s so hard to write software for the BlackBerry that most companies don’t. And without software, your platform dies. It’s like having a venue with no shows. He who has traction wins, and so far it’s only iPhone and Android. Then again, the app is not required, you can surf to the site via your browser. Thank god Verizon provides 3G speed completely over Vail Mountain!
Really, watch this video from beginning to end, even if you think skiing sucks and you hate me, this is the future:
