Making Concert Memories Social: Interview with Recreate My Night

What happens when you use social media to express and share your favorite concert memories?

In what ways do you and other concert fans use Facebook and Twitter to capture, share and celebrate your favorite concert moments?

I’ve been wondering about the answers to those questions, and as we continue to explore online, social and virtual concert experiences, I’ve been checking out and cruising around RecreateMyNight.com, a new site that allows live music fans to connect their social networking account so they can share their concert adventures and follow their favorite bands.

Besides it’s integration of social networking elements, one of the other key elements of the site’s current Beta launch has been the featuring of  psychedelic/hip hop rock band The Constellations.

And in an effort to introduce the site to live music fans, over the summer the creators of Recreate My Night have begun to allow fans to share their experiences with the Constellations in real-time and post-concert via “a living, digital scrapbook” as the tour unfolds and the excitement around the Atlanta-based group’s new album Southern Gothic builds.

Since Recreate My Night utilizes your Facebook or Twitter accounts for the login, whenever you upload videos, photos, and status updates into your Facebook profile, you have the ability to stream that content to your RMN profile.

From there you can select a time frame on the virtual calendar that zeroes in on the exact date when you attended the concert you’d like to “recreate.”  Then the site pulls all related “concert” content from that time period that you entered via photos, status updates or tweets.

I’ve been exploring the site these last few weeks, and so far, I think Recreate My Night is a pretty fun and promising site that can serve many purposes beyond just entertainment.

As more fans begin to use it, Recreate My Night could be not only an interactive and engaging way to follow your favorite band, but it could become an organic online community where concert fans can catalog, share and document their concerts experiences from multiple perspectives and POVs.

I’ve also considered Recreate My Night to be a helpful sociological and behavioral tool to document concert anthropology. Or even a cool tool to use for our concert genealogy experiments.

To get more background on the story behind Recreate My Night, I asked President Tejpaul Bhatia about the creative development of the site,  his future plans to work with other labels like EMI to promote bands and why he chose the Constellations as the first band to feature.

And since we recently spoke with Big Live about their new site, I was curious to know how Bhatia sees RMN as a different experience from other similar online live music social sharing sites.

Live Fix: What concert experiences, real or online/virtual, of your own inspired the creation and development of Recreate My Night?

Tejpaul Bhatia: RecreateMyNight came about from a confluence of experiences including concerts, weddings, parties and just regular nights out. Vik, one of the cofounders is an avid musician and also worked at MTV prior to conceiving RecreateMyNight.com, so it makes sense that the application was a great fit for bands, musicians and concert fans.

Recreate My Night was created using time stamping algorithms and social media integration, and it was developed by engineers with advanced degrees in computer science and cognition. The development team and the founders also worked previously at MTV and ESPN. How did all your previous experiences and technology background help you create this new social media concert site?

The technology part of the site came from our experiences at big companies and at startups. The time stamping algorithm came from a lot of brain power and late night brainstorming sessions from some solid engineers.

The user experience and social media integration came from using the site and working with bands to create an experience that adds value to concert going. We are not only developers but also users of the site. We are improving the site daily.

We’ve gotten really good at quickly transitioning from an idea on a whiteboard to a working application that people can interact with and give us feedback on. We also were able to leverage a lot of knowledge and expertise we gained from working on our earlier products and previous applications to build a really robust infrastructure that scales on demand, and we’ve been integrating with social media APIs since the early days.

Those experiences have directly impacted the quality of the site and the feature set available, as well as how we approach evaluating its utility and effectiveness for users and incorporating feedback to make it even better.

What element of Recreate My Night are you most excited about?

We are most excited about being able to document concerts and shows in a way that has never been possible before. We are also very excited by the support we are getting from the music industry as a whole.

RecreateMyNight really lets fans at a show engage with other fans and the band in a really direct, conversational way. It’s really cool to enable people to share their passion for a band in a way that lets them connect with other fans, even if they weren’t able to experience the concert first hand.

As other online concert experience sharing sites come into the industry, how does Recreate My Night stand out from the rest, what do you feel makes it unique from other concert-based fan social communities?

A few things make us different from the rest. The first is that everything “recreated” on our site can live beyond just the concert experience. For example if your night consisted of a concert and then a wild after party, RecreateMyNight captures that. The other major differentiator is that RecreateMyNight gathers media from all other sites. We aren’t asking people to change their behavior. People should keep uploading their photos, videos, tweets, status updates and whatever to the sites they love. RecreateMyNight will do the hard work of pulling everyone’s assets into one place.

Concerts are very powerful events in people’s lives, and Recreate My Night empowers fans to remembers their concert experiences in a unique way. How will RMN allow fans to remember their concert experiences like never before?

RecreateMyNight pulls in all media generated at the show or about the show. It first starts with what you created. It then goes through what your friends created. Finally it goes through what everyone at the show created. You get to remember the night from your perspective and you also get to remember it from everyone else’s perspective as well, including the bands.

In what ways do you feel Recreate My Night will change the regular non-virtual concert experience for fans?

RecreateMyNight will encourage fans to document their experiences and share them with other fans. It will also create an experience that lives on long after the final curtain call. Engagement with the show can live on forever now.

As we integrate more deeply with bands, we’ll provide both a destination where people can return to revisit a night, as well as a jumping off point for bands to promote their merchandise (songs for sale / download, t-shirts, posters, etc).

During concerts there can be a barrier between bands and fans that keeps them from connecting beyond the music, so how will the site change the concert experience and performance for bands when it comes to connecting them socially, emotionally and psychologically?

Band members are attendees of the shows as well. These days most artists are connected on many platforms. Fans can see the night from the band’s perspective and can share their experiences directly with the band.

You can also envision some scenarios where fans could interact with a band well before the performance, and impact stuff like voting on songs for the set list, helping to choose the opening band, suggesting favorite local venues. The band doesn’t have to be huge for RMN to make a real impact. We’re excited to dig deeper into the long tail of the indie music scene as well — there are so many talented bands that have really passionate local fan bases in cities and towns all the

across the world.

If you could go back and have the chance to use Recreate My Night for one of your favorite concerts, what concert would it be and why? And how would you use RMN to do so?

Tej: I would recreate The Red Hot Chili Peppers and Foo Fighters concert in Hershey Pennsylvania about a decade ago. It was a crazy show and I talk about it all the time. I am curious if my memories are actually accurate or if I was just high on the performance.

Vik : I saw U2 play in CT on their Elevation Tour back in 2001. It was literally one of the best experiences of my life — they were totally at the top of their game, they played lots of their best songs, I was with really fun people. I’d love to be able to go back now and watch performances of that night, or see photos that other fans had captured, or look back on other people’s reactions in real time from all over the stadium. None of that stuff was possible then in the way that it is now.

Why did you choose the Constellations as the first band to utilize Recreate My Night?

The great thing about The Constellations is that they are a big band (lots of members), they tour a lot and they are very connected on social media. It seemed like a natural fit when the label proposed it to us. The name of the site “A Night with The Constellations” also sounds cool!

What other bands will be featured on Recreate My Night?

You will see more bands featured on RecreateMyNight soon, but we can’t say who just yet. Stay tuned.

Since the site is associated with EMI Virgin, will that record label be the only record label to use Recreate My Night?

RecreateMyNight is not exclusive to any one label.

What plans do you have to develop the site and make adjustments? How can concert fans help improve the RecreateMyNight experience?

Our goal is to develop the best possible user experience. We are fortunate that we found an application that serves a great purpose for fans and bands alike. We welcome all feedback and take it very seriously. If anyone has ideas on how to improve the site, they can click on the feedback tab at www.RecreateMyNight.com and tell us what they think.

Thank you to Tejpaul and Vik for sharing the RCM story and their own concert experiences.

How Would You Recreate Your Night?

As I mentioned earlier, I’m excited about the potential to use RMN as a organic and living concert fan experience experiment. And as I’ve been thinking more about the site, here are some other questions that we should think about and you’re welcome to add your own in the comments below.

• If we continue to give concert fans the ability to share their concert memories in ways like this, will the concert experience become more impersonal from the oversharing?
• Overtime will we begin to see which parts of the concert experience fans don’t want to document, share or remember? Will a pattern develop that will tell us key insights into what fans love the most about concerts?
• By sharing and documenting their own experiences, will concert fans force concert photographers and writers to rethink how they document a show?

Go Check It Out:

You can visit recreatemynight.com and click on the big yellow “Start” button to get involved

Or

You can go right to  theconstellations.recreatemynight.com to see their tour and digital scrapbook in action.

Go to the RMN blog for more news, updates and info.