The Best Events Are Starting Digitally

I’m an events person.

I got my start in this business not by playing an instrument, but as a promoter, because I loved bringing people together. Beats x Bytes actually started as an event series called SoundCTRL. (Good times!) I became a booking agent and helped orchestrate the early live careers of many of your favorite artists.

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And I still love going out. I saw three AMAZING concerts last week. A true perk of the business and THE place to see and be seen.

There’s something you can learn from being in a room that you can’t get from a screen. Going outside can be a portal to opportunities, people, and worlds you might never otherwise encounter.

These days, I spend a lot of my working hours thinking about events, tours, experiences, and what makes people actually want to leave their homes and show up with their wallets.

I’m also a content connoisseur. I read a ton of newsletters, articles, trend reports, magazines, and books. I listen to all of the new music I can and a heavy rotation of podcasts. I’m always gathering intel and insight.

Lately, those two worlds have been colliding.

This week, Brian Morrissey’s The Rebooting held its Audience Summit, Dan Runcie’s Trapital held its annual summit, and the “All-In Podcast” held theirs as well.

I went to Brian’s at the World Trade Center.

It was happening during one of the busiest event weeks in New York. Fast Company Innovation Festival was nearby. The Atlantic had its festival down the block. There were bigger stages, bigger names, and bigger production budgets all over the city.

But The Rebooting was packed with exactly the people who were supposed to be there.

Media operators. Publishers. Digital people. Entrepreneurs. People who read Brian’s work because they trust him to tell them what’s actually happening in their business.

And some of the most interesting stuff wasn’t happening onstage.

You could hear it in the hallways. Q4 plans. New companies. Partnerships. Deals. Ideas that haven’t been announced yet.

That’s alpha.

Podcasts and newsletters have spent years building a particularly intimate kind of audience. They’re in our ears on runs and commutes. We read them in bed and over breakfast. We hear from the same voices every week.

When those communities show up IRL, that trust comes with them and the events feel different. 

For years, media companies chased scale. The more interesting currency right now might be concentration. Can you get the right people into the same room? 

That matters to brands, too. Signal over Scale has been a mantra of mine. 

Attention online can be bought. Getting the right people to willingly spend three hours together is much harder.

And it doesn’t stop with B2B media.

People want to step inside the things they love. They want their communities, fandoms, and favorite worlds to become physical. I’ve been spending a lot of time lately thinking about what that looks like when you take it to a much bigger scale.

There’s plenty of eventslop out there. We don’t need more events for the sake of making more content.

We need better reasons to show up.

I came up in this business, and after spending years watching culture move deeper onto our screens, I’m increasingly interested in what gets us back into the same room.

From URL to IRL.

I think we’re going to be seeing a lot more of it.

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