Surreal: the Aussie trio taking on the music business
Being ‘not so great on tech’ hasn’t stopped these three Melbourne tech founders from trying to up-end the entire live entertainment industry online.
The three co-founders of an online platform that is disrupting the music business happily admit they are good on vision and sales but not so great on tech. That didn’t stop Jeremiah Siemianow, Brandon Crimmins and Alan Jin, who between them had studied commerce, science, arts and marketing at university, when they launched Surreal Entertainment in 2019. They looked around the world and hired some of the best and brightest tech heads – from MYOB, Facebook and Etsy – to set up programs that they argue are reimagining the legacy music and entertainment sectors.
This is an article from The List: Innovators 2024, which is announced in full on October 18.
With investment of $2.5m so far, Surreal, based in Melbourne, has just seven employees and is on the verge of being profitable.
The platform began as a marketplace for entertainers looking for gigs but has morphed into a business providing infrastructure and back-office services for venues, entertainers and agencies.
Surreal now services about 1000 venues, 15,000 entertainers and 150 agents, mostly in Australia, New Zealand and Britain, but with increased penetration in Europe, Asia and North America.
Says Siemianow: “When we entered the industry, we wanted to create a product for the entire industry, but the feedback we got was that artists just wanted to be able to find more gig opportunities. Venues were struggling, in some cases, to find new acts, so we thought the best thing we could do was to build a marketplace.”
The three quickly realised the big opportunity was in servicing venues that needed a better way to manage their logistics, things such as communications, scheduling, bookings and payments. So they built a site to “handle every single thing the business is doing from an entertainment standpoint”.
In short, it’s a new ecosystem with a level of infrastructure not previously seen in the sector.
And the ideas just keep coming. One of the more recent innovations is a product that allows entertainers and other venue workers to be paid on the night rather than waiting for the cash.
The Fast Track payments tool was released a few months ago and has already proved popular, with about 22 per cent of employees taking up the service each week.
“We weren’t a fintech company, but now people are considering us as being in the fintech space. We’ve been able to create a brand new product that doesn’t exist around the world in the live entertainment space.”
Before they launched Surreal, Crimmins had managed venues, Jin saw himself as a “recovering musician” who had tried to break through in the industry, and Siemianow had worked in hospitality.
Now, they are united in an ambitious vision to change a live entertainment industry that has lagged in adopting and developing digitised operational systems. “The vision for us is that every piece of live entertainment around the world will be booked on our platform,” Siemianow says.