The live event space is more capacious than ever. What was once a somewhat siloed experience, in part defined by a network of venues and operational norms, has slowly expanded to include strategies culled from the worlds of art, fashion, and beyond. The event has become less of a discrete happening and more of a flashpoint for world-building, both before and after an artist touches the stage.

Within this new reality, ITM Studio is attempting to thread the needle, connecting artist and fan, commerce and creativity. Started by Saarim Zaman and Cam Diamond, two veterans of underground music, ITM’s tools open up conceptual possibilities for event promotion, planning, and marketing that help artists tell their own story on their own terms. 

We wanted to learn more, so we sat down with Zaman and Diamond and talked about their backgrounds in music, ITM’s strategies for artist empowerment, and some recent highlights from ITM-powered events, which have included everything from an FKA Twigs afterparty to a Club Chess event that featured a performance from Nina favorite Evanora Unlimited. ITM is in private beta, if you’re interested in giving the tools a spin early, send Saarim and Cam an email at founders@itm.studio. Read our interview below.

What are both of your histories with live music? How did you get to this point where you wanted to work on this project? 

Cam: I'm a hardcore kid at heart, I grew up playing in hardcore bands in Australia. The hardcore scene has always been super DIY, super community led, funded by DIY merch. We didn't play in real venues ever. Everything was like a town hall or someone's backyard. I then spent my career in the creative industry, where I was adjacent to music the whole time, designing and building experiences for fashion brands, hotels, and artists continuously hit with fragmented tools and an inability to really build worlds around moments. I just hit a point where I wanted to dedicate myself to solving this.

Saarim: I grew up in Bangladesh playing in rock and metal bands and then went to college in the US, where I got really into electronic music: LA beat, IDM, deconstructed club, etc. I was booking a lot of acts and was also incidentally asked to open for a lot of them, too. I just started just being really involved in the production of it all, booking, performing, promoting, being the sound guy and so on. I’ve been an early Nina user, I’ve been putting out music on Nina for quite some time. I think ITM is a distillation of some of these things, some of that energy, and trying to marry it—software for music in general has not really changed much in the past decade or so, and so we're kind of taking a pretty radical new approach to it. The interfaces look different. The backend looks different. The kinds of things we're going after look different. The way we sign people up is totally different.

What's exciting you the most about the live music environment right now? 

Saarim: What's really exciting for me is the move away from traditional venues. We've been seeing a lot of, in New York, just so many more interesting spaces. People are selling interesting physical products, doing more DIY, hiding locations, making it a bit more high-friction to get to the space, to the experience.

Cam: I think on my end, it's live music becoming more of an event and more of an experience, where it's not just the music anymore. We're in a cycle where the content, story and merch are now part of the live experience, it's expanding beyond just the time that you're at the live event. I've been to shows where there's art performances between bands, event-live screenprinting of merch. This is the future we are building for.

Do you feel like it's one of your roles to maybe facilitate these ideas that have more abstract parameters around them than a normal ticketed concert? 

Cam: We like to say there's an event, there's an experience, and there's a moment. An event, which is just you go to something, the experience is what's around the event, and then the moment is from the second that ticket goes on sale, leading up into the experience and then long after the curtain falls is what we're trying to help artists capture and own, so they can actually have the story, have that connection and relationship beyond just playing the music. Essentially ITM is the relationship layer, not just ticketing.

It does seem like an extended experience is more and more of a part of live concerts. At the highest level, there’s something like that Oasis tour where there’s these offsite merch stores. Can ITM scale that general idea to a more modest level? 

Saarim: Yeah, totally. The majors are already on this tip. I think the Sabrina Carpenter tour was going on at the same time as the Oasis tour and there were these two dueling lines, one block apart in Soho for the merch popup. We deal with a lot of pain when it comes to stitching together all of these pieces of software to make it happen, especially from the artist manager side— usually the artists and the manager are the ones really pushing for that in most cases. We just kind of see our role is kind of making that more frictionless.

We are a ticketing platform, but we're not a ticketing platform. We are a merch platform, we're not a merch platform. We're a direct channel for communication with your audience. So we're kind of this bundle of things, but it's all kind of in the service of making more of these moments happen in real life.

Cam: Yeah, I would say we’re the relationship layer is probably the best way to sum it all up. Anytime that the artist communicates with a fan or vice versa, we want to sort of streamline that for them. 

You could set up like a scavenger hunt for a band if they needed that. 

Cam: We have. So actually, we're just not in music, we’re industry agnostic. We work with Fucking Awesome, the skate brand, a night market in LA called MAMA, a new fight night called SUNDOWN just to name a few. We're doing a lot of interesting things around geofencing and QR codes and scavenger hunts.

What does that look like, just in general?

Cam: So in music, what we're trying to do is give artists deep location data that can inform future moments and tours.Our QR codes are paired with geofences with scheduled link access allowing for limitless capture opportunities. So it could be, artists go into key cities and hide QR codes and full Easter egg it—they could be on billboards, they could just be stickers. We've even looked at doing merch with QR codes on the back of people walking around.

Are there any events you've thrown over the past year that stand out as being really memorable? 

Saarim: We do all these Club Chess events, they use us for a lot of their stuff, but they did this really fun one with Evanora Unlimited at Mehanata, the Bulgarian bar on the Lower East Side. We did a Fakemink pop-up show with Welcome JPEG this time last year, right before he went super viral. That had the longest line I've ever seen for the tiniest venue ever on St. Mark's, and that got shut down by cops shortly after.

There’s all these people trying to do kind of hectic stuff that I think has been super memorable. But then on the other end, SZA blasted out an ITM link to like her 22 million fans for her official MSG after party pop-up that we thought was going to be a private event, but turned out it was for the fans too. So that generated a bunch of noise and people were excited. The support line was one of my phone numbers, so I just kept getting hundreds and hundreds of phone calls to get into this free show.

What does your dream ITM concert situation look like? There's a million use cases for this thing, but what’s a thing you've been waiting for somebody to implement?

Cam: I think for us it’s the full moment. Having artists’ world build with all our tooling and grow and engage their community before the concert even happens, so then we have the understanding of who the fan is—that the concert and performance can be personalized to each person. My dream concert is to be able to use that to actually make everyone feel like that concert was for them in a really cool way, such as unique merch for every attendee. Then the idea of what happens after that, and continuing the conversation around the performance, whether that's through content, Q&A’s, whatever it may be. I just think there's a huge opportunity to extend the lifespan of a single moment.

Saarim: As the person on the technical side, we're helping on a few different album release campaigns for major artists this year, but it's just really seeing all of the tooling being used in one go, all the way leading up to the thing, all the way after. I’m excited for that.

And to end things: What’s the best concert you’ve ever seen?

Cam: When I was a child I won tickets to Michael Jackson's History tour from a radio competition which was a wild first concert to attend.  Most recently the coolest thing I've seen was Djion at the Greek, actually, I say it too much, but one of the best live performances I've seen in many many years, of someone just owning the crowd with every note and making each person feel connected to him.

Saarim: I think maybe a decade plus ago, I saw Sigur Rós at MSG and Tim Hecker opened, and that was just a very weird thing to happen. I'd only been there for a basketball game before, and I think that was really cool, really memorable just because of just how strange it was to be in that context. I worked on this weird Wu-Tang Clan project, around that one-of-one record, I was doing creative direction, tech, a bunch of stuff. We did a bunch of listenings for that all over the world last year, including one at Angel Orensanz, where they also shot for 36 Chambers. That was cool because a bunch of Wu-Tang people showed up, it was this very opinionated experience around really making a record.

Consuming a record is kind of lost, I was reading this ASAP Rocky New Yorker piece about how his album launch was underwhelming, and I just think of so much has to do with the listening context, and the placement, and how you kind of tee up how you listen to this—whether you’re riding your Citi Bike, listening on your headphones, or if you're in a space that's been designed to listen to it. So, that was really fun. That wasn’t live music though, I guess.

Well, you know, it's an event, and I guess what we're talking about here is kind of the expanding parameters of the event. 

Saarim: Yeah, totally. I went to a Blawan listening thing for his new record a few months ago, and that was really cool, because it was 30 people listening to a club record from start to end, just kind of standing there at Home Sweet Home. Things like that I'm really excited about because it requires you to be super present and it’s not a traditional live music context. I definitely want to see more of that, to help people set those up, because I think that's an interesting way of releasing new work, too.