For the past five years, Digital Dreams Toronto — which attracts thousands of people for a music festival by the water — has been quietly observing how it could augment its festival experience with advances in tech.
“Cashless payment systems decrease lines and wait times for everything.”
This year, the festival is relying on the latest “music festival technology” to create a more seamless experience. This year, the festival’s wristband will connect to its user’s credit card of choice as a pay-as-you-go system. The festival also updated their app to allow users to customize their experience based on a personalized schedule builder, and a map-based finder that helps people locate their friends.
“Fans used to purchase a ticket, show up onsite to exchange it for a wristband then get in another line to enter the festival. Once they were in, they used a paper map and spent the day worried about the large amount of cash they had on them or how to find their friends,” said said Mark Russell, a project manager at Live Nation. “Now, they receive their wristbands in the mail that contain RFID chips, they register their wristband, connect it to their credit card and secure it with a four-digit pin code.”
The festival will also use push technology to share deals as customers walk through the space, and remind people to hydrate throughout the weekend.
“Cashless payment systems decrease lines and wait times for everything. The average cash transaction is somewhere around 50 seconds long, the average cashless transaction is about 15 seconds . Now think about that with 30,000 people per day doing an average of 4 interactions with the RFID and cashless systems per day. That’s a savings of roughly 1,100 transaction hours per day.”