Queremos! – a crowdfunding site for concerts – has successfully organized many concerts in Brazil. The platform was founded in 2010 by five music lovers who discovered that it was difficult to get concerts scheduled in their home town of Rio.
Promoters viewed the risk of scheduling concerts in this famous beach city as too too difficult. So the founders set out to rectify this deficiency. The result was a concert crowdfunding platform that incorporated social crowdfunding integrating the desires of the fans, artists and promoters. As success grew in Brazil the founders set their sites on the larger market to the north, deciding to being the platform to the United States. The site for North America was launched as WeDemand.
The platform allows supporters to purchase a ticket for a potential concert. If tickets sold do not reach the minimum set by the organizer everyone gets refunded and there is no concert. If the minimum is achieved the concert is scheduled. Of course supporters are incentivized to share the possible concert, thus benefiting from social “word of mouth.”
Bruno Natal, who is the CMO and a co-founder of WeDemand, is also a music writer who has been featured in major publications in Brazil, the US and the UK. He is also an award winning filmmaker for his full length documentary, Dub Echoes, about the influence of Dub in contemporary electronic music. Natal recently stated:
We believe WeDemand is a tool that can optimize concert operations for bands of all sizes, agents and venues alike, effectively giving them the unique power to tap directly into new audiences and meet their demands in a more precise manner. We definitely see WeDemand as an open, big data platform that will become an integral tool for bands and venues when booking tours and discovering new markets, and one that will ultimately revolutionize concert promotion amongst fans.
Performers such as LCD Soundsystem, Vampire Weekend, Chromeo, Warpaint, Primal Scream, James Blake, The National and 
many others have been crowdfunded on their platform. WeDemand continues to schedule new performers at new locations as they continue to experiment and evolve their application. While the concert crowdfunding environment is more challenging in the US and Canada, as there are already an established list of concert crowdfunding sites, this fact has not slowed the WeDemand team. Recently the platform partnered with the Brooklyn Bowl to tap into local fans, gauge interest for the show and launch its funding. In line with WeDemand’s crowdfunding services, fans and venues assumed zero risk in putting this concert together, as no ticket fees were charged until the show was officially launched.
The growing crowdfunding platform has also been invited to to the TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield, TEDx (Rio), MIT (Boston), Canadian Music Week (Toronto),and Creativity World Forum (Belgium). WeDemand received seed funding from Talis Capital in the amount of $900,000 several months back. With additional funding from other follow-on investors, it appears that WeDemand has sufficient capital to take their vision to the next level.
