Playtoome was established in 2016 in Bengaluru / Singapore, Playtoome, is a live entertainment platform, connecting artists with their fans irrespective of boundaries. The unexplored space of live performances entertainment option for tier 2 and tier 3 cities and with digital era taking over, there is a good scope for performing artists to get the much due acknowledgment from their audience and widen their reach in the most convenient manner, is now being explored by Playtime.
A fan can watch performances by his or her favorite artiste by paying a minimal fee to enter the show on the platform. The revenue generated from the performances is shared with the artiste – 50% – 70%. Currently, Top 1-2% of the artists takes 90% of the revenue. The platform monetizes through ticket sales, personalized shows, and virtual gifts.
Keerthivasan Subramanian, Founder, and CEO of Playtoome– live entertainment platform speaks about the platform and way forward…
What is Playtoome, and how was this conceptualized?
In India, Bollywood (Films across languages) together with Cricket are the only commercially viable formats. Whilst Indian films have brought fame to India globally, there has been collateral damage – Indian performing arts – our music (folk and classical), dance forms, stories – all are subsumed and see light only when presented in a Bollywood movie. Playtoome is created to give an authentic platform to these art forms globally. Playtoome founder identified the same and decided to establish a platform that will provide opportunities to these artists and help them reach their target audiences.
It has been two years since you started. What have been the challenges in establishing something like Playtoome?
After establishing Playtoome the first requirement was to create awareness so that people are aware that they have opportunities on digital platforms now. Active organic marketing and mostly word of mouth helped us reach them. Then once the ball started rolling it was a double whammy. We have today 100K + consumers on our platform that have been organically built.
There have been about 2000+ artists who have performed on your platform, what are the different genres you cater to?
We have worked on 20+ genres in Music (Classical – Hindustani / Carnatic, Folk, Rock, Pop, Ghazal, Retro, etc), 5+ genres in Dance (Bharatnatyam, Khatak, Modern Dance), Storytelling, Book reading, Visual art and Stand up comedy across 5+ languages – Hindi, English, Bengali, Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalam, We have more than 50+ international artistes who have performed from the USA, UAE, UK, Europe in Western Rock, Pop and Classical genres.
Are you only catering to Urban audiences? Any plans to move to Tier 2&3 markets?
Close to 50% of our audience/performer base is from Tier 2 / 3 towns
On the contrary, though we have registrations and active performances from urban regions, our prime focus is to dig talent from tier 2 and tier 3 cities only. Most of the artists who perform on our platforms are the ones who were unable to get recognition in their region and now through online mediums like Playtoome they can reach their target audiences irrespective of distance.
Due to the pandemic all live shows are on hold, digital consumption saw a surge, what was the response to Playtoome? Way forward for Playtoome?
We grew 10X last year over the pious year across all parameters – Consumers, Performances, and Revenue. We plan to host over 500K artists and entertain over 10M viewers by the 2022 fiscal end.
