Meridith Valiando Rojas, 30, has spent just about half of her life working in the music industry and social media. Now, she’s the co-founder and C.E.O. of DigiTour Media, a touring music and social media festival production company that is demonstrating explosive growth with numbers that rival many of the country’s biggest traditional music festivals.
The live events bring together young people’s icons of choice—social media stars—for what DigiTour bills as the world’s first all-ages social media tour and music festival.
What started as a simple showcase for social media stars from YouTube now has a lineup that includes Internet-famous people from all over the social Web, including Vine, Twitter, and Instagram, alongside traditional pop stars. And the festival is growing fast.
With stages in venues such as theaters, fields, and parking lots, the four-year-old event began with events in about 25 cities for roughly several hundred attendees at a time.
By 2014, the program included 60 dates and sold 130,000 tickets, and the numbers for 2015 are even bigger with a projected 141 dates and 250,000 tickets.
The festival’s niche demographic—the Gen Z crowd, consisting of teens ages 13 to 17—helps it stand out in a crowded field. “We are the only company programming festivals for teens,” she says. “Gen Z just outpaced millennial as the largest generation in the country at 26 percent.”
The festival also strives to create a once-in-a-lifetime live experience that generates buzz and provokes social media envy from attendees’ followers. “We focus on creating best-day-of-your-life experiences. This audience wants the stars they follow religiously [on] social platforms [and have] grown to know intimately.”
In addition to a music festival, DigiTour is “also live comedic skits, interactive games with the audience, and immersive brand activations from our sponsors,” Valiando Rojas says. “It’s for teens by teens, and we are the only event delivering this level of entertainment featuring the best of what’s trending on the Internet [in real life].”
Rojas says more and more cities are in her sights for DigiTour. “We are going to be expanding to more international markets. We plan to add more experiences and also focus on including more verticals.” And the team is growing exponentially, too: At press time, Valiando Rojas said, “We’ll more than double in the next 12 weeks, with hires in sales, tech, and content.”
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