About

What is this thing for?

Making good content is hard enough. Getting your work to an audience is often harder, since layers of gatekeepers stand in the way, taking control out of your hands. Crowd Controls makes it possible to find where your fans are so you can book shows only where you have critical mass and drive up demand where it’s lacking. It’s about letting your crowd drive your success, not the gatekeepers.

Here’s how it works.

  1. We give you a form that you can customize and embed on your website or almost anywhere you want.
  2. Fans enter their email address and city or post code. (It helps if you give them a good reason.)
  3. CC finds clusters of fans and plots them on an interactive map, showing bigger points in cities with the most demand.
  4. Set goals for demand size around the world, and fans can see how close they are to getting a show in their home town.
  5. Export a spreadsheet of fans, filtered by location.
  6. Generate reports to show to distributors and venues demonstrating that you have enough local demand to sell out.
  7. Email fans when you’re having a show in their area, making sure they don’t miss out and aren’t bothered by irrelevant messages.
  8. Play your show and kick ass.

History

Crowd Controls began as a prototype that Brian Chirls created for the independent film Four Eyed Monsters (which you can learn about here and here). The filmmakers, lacking a distributor, didn’t have the money for an advertising campaign and therefore couldn’t convince theater owners to take a risk on the film. Having built a sizable online audience, they promised fans that they would find a way to book the film in any city with at least 150 fan requests. With the resulting data, they were able to successfully show the film in dozens of cities around the United States.

Brian, taking lessons from Four Eyed Monsters and improving upon other tools, has rebuilt the software as a service to be made available to other filmmakers, as well as musicians and other performers, starting with Iron Sky. Brian writes about new strategies and ideas for film and other media at his blog.