At the National Independent Venue Association conference this week, ROSTR unveiled one of its most ambitious expansions to date: a comprehensive venue database designed to help agents, managers, promoters and venue operators discover, analyze and connect with concert venues across the live music landscape.
The move represents a natural evolution for ROSTR, which has become a widely used industry resource for artist, management and agency information. By adding venue data to the platform, the company is seeking to solve a longstanding problem in live entertainment: the lack of a centralized, searchable database that allows industry professionals to quickly identify the right rooms for touring artists.
The announcement was made in partnership with NIVA and will incorporate the organization's "Live Independent" designation, allowing users to easily identify independently owned venues across the country.
In a conversation following the launch, ROSTR founder Mark Williamson discussed why venues were the logical next step for the company, how the platform will work, why independent venues are central to its strategy, and how artificial intelligence is helping small music-tech companies build products that previously would have required vastly larger engineering teams.
Below is an edited transcript of the conversation.
Q: Why expand into venues now?
Mark Williamson: It felt like the obvious next step for us.
We've wanted to do it for a long time, but as the company has grown we've finally reached the point where we have the resources to tackle another major data set.
Our core belief has always been that the music industry benefits when fragmented information is brought together into one place and presented through good software. Better data isn't a zero-sum game. When information is easier to access, it becomes easier for everyone to collaborate.
Venues made sense because a large portion of our existing customer base already uses ROSTR. Venues use it. Promoters use it. Agents and managers use it. They were already coming to the platform for artist and representation information, but the venue side of the business wasn't represented.
This allows us to serve both audiences at the same time.
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