Audience Republic
Unleash your event's full potential with our all-in-one audience CRM and marketing platform.
The worst night of Jared Kristensen's career started the company. He was promoting an event, the tickets did not move the way he hoped, and by the end he was roughly $20,000 down. Most people would file that under expensive lessons and move on. Kristensen filed it under unsolved problem. The event was good. The marketing was not. And the marketing was not bad because he was lazy - it was bad because the tools available to an independent promoter were a jumble of spreadsheets, Facebook ads that forgot him the moment he stopped paying, and no clear way to answer the only question that mattered: which of the things I did actually sold a ticket?
Audience Republic is Kristensen's answer to that question, built out over the better part of a decade from a Sydney desk and now running quietly behind presales for more than 300 music festivals. If you have ever typed your email into a page to register for early access to a show, refer a friend to jump a waitlist, or enter a competition to win tickets, there is a fair chance you were using it without ever seeing the name. That is by design. This is infrastructure, not a brand fans are meant to notice.
01 / WHAT IT ISA CRM that speaks festival, not funnel
Strip away the category labels and Audience Republic is a customer relationship manager and marketing platform built specifically for live events - festivals, venues, promoters, theatres, comedy nights, clubs, artists and creators. The generic version of this software already exists, of course. There is no shortage of email and SMS tools. But most of them were designed for e-commerce carts or B2B sales pipelines, and a concert is neither. A show is spiky and emotional and happens once. Demand builds for weeks and then collapses into a single on-sale moment. A tool built for a steady subscription funnel does not know what to do with that shape.
Audience Republic organises itself around the event, not the contact. The core pieces fit together into one workflow: an Audience CRM that stores fan profiles and lets organisers slice them into segments; Data Capture tools - presale registrations, competitions, waitlists and sign-up forms - that turn interest into first-party data; Email and SMS marketing to reach those fans directly; Paid Ad Audiences that push that same data into Meta, TikTok and Google; and Marketing Automation to run it all on rails. Sitting over the top is the part promoters actually care about - sales attribution, so a team can look back and say this SMS, this competition, this segment is what moved the tickets.
02 / THE TRICKWhen fans become the marketing channel
The most interesting idea in the product is the least technical one. Audience Republic's data-capture campaigns are gamified. A fan who registers for a presale can earn points by sharing the link, referring friends and following the artist. Rack up enough points and you climb a leaderboard toward rewards - cheaper presale tickets, a better spot in the queue, a prize. Register for a sold-out show's waitlist and you can bump your place by doing the same.
Build, reach and sell to an audience you own.
- The line Kristensen keeps coming back toThe mechanic is simple and slightly addictive, and it does two jobs at once. It grows the organiser's database, because every share pulls in new registrations. And it lowers the cost of the next sale, because a fan who arrived through a friend's referral tends to be worth more than a paid click that will forget the brand by tomorrow. In effect the audience does a portion of the marketing. For an industry that has spent fifteen years renting reach from social platforms - and watching that reach evaporate every time an algorithm shifts - a system that turns fans into a channel you own is not a gimmick. It is the whole point.
03 / WHO USES ITFrom club nights to Live Nation
The customer list runs the full width of the industry. At one end are independent operators - a club night, a regional festival, a single touring comedian. At the other are the giants: the company names Live Nation, AEG Presents, Frontier Touring, TEG and Untitled Group among its clients, and its tools have sat behind events involving artists such as Flume and ODESZA. More than 300 music festivals globally have run campaigns on it, including names like The BPM Festival and Lights All Night.
That spread matters because it tells you what the product is really selling. A small promoter buys Audience Republic to finally have professional marketing without a marketing department. A major touring company buys it because generic CRMs cannot handle the cadence and attribution of a live-events calendar, and because owning fan data across a portfolio of shows compounds in value. Same tool, different reasons, and both point at the same underlying need - keep the relationship with the fan, and know what worked.
04 / THE STACKA layer on top of ticketing, not a rival to it
One decision shapes the whole business, and it is a restrained one: Audience Republic does not try to sell tickets itself. It is not a ticketing company, and it does not want the fight. Instead it sits as a marketing and data layer above whatever ticketing system a client already uses, integrating with Eventbrite, Ticketmaster, Ticketek, Moshtix, DICE, Tixr, Humanitix, Universe, Megatix, Eventix, Ticket Tailor and more.
This is a smart bit of positioning. Ticketing is a brutal, entrenched market with enormous incumbents. By declining to enter it, Audience Republic makes those incumbents into plumbing it plugs into rather than enemies it has to beat. Its rivals are instead the other tools promoters reach for to do marketing - purpose-built players like Prekindle, Laylo, Marcato and Prism.fm, the marketing suites bundled into ticketing platforms, and the generic Mailchimps and Klaviyos that events use when they have not found anything better. Against the generics, its pitch is that it was built for this exact job. Against the specialists, it is the breadth - capture, CRM, email, SMS, ads and attribution in one place.
05 / THE MONEYBoring where it counts
The business model is unglamorous B2B SaaS, which is a compliment. Organisers pay a subscription, generally scaled by audience size, message volume and feature tier. The company has been funded in the patient, staged way you would expect of an Australian startup that had to survive a global shutdown of its entire customer base: a seed round in 2017 with Artesian Capital and QUT Creative Enterprise Australia, further backing from investors including Macdoch Ventures and Earl Grey Capital, and a Series A in 2022 with Blackbird Ventures and Y Combinator among the names on the cap table. Public startup trackers have put its valuation in the region of $51 million, a figure worth treating as approximate rather than gospel.
The pandemic detail is not incidental. When live events stopped, Audience Republic's customers stopped selling tickets overnight. A lesser company might have folded. Instead the shutdown sharpened the pitch. The promoters who came through it best were the ones who had kept their audience data - they reopened with a list to call. The ones who had rented their reach started again from zero. That is the argument Audience Republic had been making all along, delivered by circumstance.
06 / THE EDGEBuilt by someone who got burned
The company's real moat is hard to put on a feature comparison: it was built by an operator. Before software, Kristensen ran Showtec Entertainment and booked artists. He has stood on the losing side of a badly marketed event, which is why the product tends to solve the problems promoters actually have rather than the ones a software team imagines they have. That domain scar shows up in small decisions - the leaderboard mechanic, the refusal to fight ticketing, the insistence on attribution - that add up to a tool that feels made for the job.
The promoters who kept their audience data reopened with a list. The rest started from zero.
- The lesson the 2020 shutdown taught the industryWhere Audience Republic fits in the market, then, is the seam between ticketing and social advertising - the part of the live-events stack that used to be spreadsheets and hope. It is a small team, around 25 people, headquartered in Sydney with a foothold in Los Angeles, doing something deliberately narrow and doing it for an industry that big generic software never bothered to understand. The name most concertgoers will never learn. The infrastructure they will keep using every time they race to register before a show sells out.