Pollstar (11/20/20) Gottfried, Gideon

Driift has struck gold in the five months since it began producing high-quality ticketed concert livestreams, staging 14 shows with different artists and selling roughly 300,000 tickets. Driift CEO Ric Salmon calls this an enormous accomplishment, one that has yielded important insights on audience tastes. "We originally thought that it was going to be quite a tech-heavy format and platform, in the sense that fans would want to interact with the performers, chat rooms, private rooms, etc.," he says. "Actually, we've found, for the most part, people just prefer just to have an incredible viewing experience." Driift data indicates that most of its viewers are screening concerts on smart TVs rather than on their mobile phones. Salmon's team is becoming bolder when filming shows in order to push the creativity envelope: for example, Driift's upcoming Andrea Bocelli Christmas concert is directed by Cirque du Soleil and Celine Dion veteran Franco Dragone, and will be recorded and streamed live from Italy's Teatro Regio di Parma opera house. Salmon is particularly excited about Driift's potentially global ticket-buying audience, noting that "with this format, you're targeting fans no matter where they live." Also of interest is an emerging artist performance series in London, which Salmon says focuses on doing "a lot more with developing artists, which will require finding solutions to shooting these shows at a cheaper level."

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