Dustin Sugar-Moore tried an experiment early in the pandemic, when half-empty venues had become normal and drop-counts were the metric every promoter was watching. He asked a chatbot to write the weekly newsletter that I.M.P., the independent concert promotion and production company behind 9:30 Club, Merriweather Post Pavilion, The Anthem, Lincoln Theatre, and The Atlantis, sends to its fans.
"Just to see how this would go," he tells us. The output came back generic and confident, missing the specific knowledge two decades of watching bands in D.C.-area venues gives you. He hasn't asked a chatbot to write a newsletter since. His position on AI in writing hasn't changed, and it sets the terms for how I.M.P. handles email. Sugar-Moore is I.M.P.'s marketing director, which in practice means writing emails calibrated by audience and held together by a voice fans have come to recognize.
I.M.P. now sends a targeted email every weekday plus three weekly blasts across all five venues. Six years ago the same program ran on a single weekly email that crammed in every show. The shift from one to many came down to discipline within their cadence.
Twelve writers, one editor, one voice
The voice within I.M.P.’s emails is the part that's hardest to copy and the easiest for any subscriber to feel the absence of. Sugar-Moore describes it as "part music nerd, part older brother, part too cool for school," and the description tracks with the actual writing, which reads like a friend telling you, with a particular kind of authority, that an artist you may not have heard of is worth your Wednesday night.
The team rotates the writing across twelve full-time employees, each of whom contributes one or two artist blurbs a week. Sugar-Moore edits the batch on Tuesday evenings, and the newsletter ships Wednesday afternoon.
The constant calibration in writing is how much to explain to their audience. As Dustin puts it, you don't want to over-explain the Foo Fighters to a crowd that already knows them, and you don't want to under-explain an artist brand new to the scene. That middle-ground judgment is the actual work, and it's what makes the writing read like music journalism rather than marketing copy.
It's also why I.M.P. can't outsource the writing to AI. The calibration sits in the heads of people who go to shows, listen to the records, and care which act is opening for whom, which is work that doesn't compress into a prompt.
Pandemic drop-counts forced daily sends
Fans had bought tickets for shows that kept getting postponed during the pandemic, and by the time the rescheduled date arrived, many had forgotten, moved, or lost interest. I.M.P. could sell out a show on paper and still walk into a half-empty room. That problem reshaped the email program.
Drop-counts became the operational crisis every venue was talking about, and pre-show reminders were the obvious response nobody had bandwidth to do at scale.
The team ran pre-show reminders before the pandemic only for the largest Merriweather and Anthem shows, since smaller venues didn't justify the labor. Reminders became standard across all five rooms after the pandemic, and when Hive released an automation that templated the smaller-venue reminders, the operational cost dropped to nearly nothing.
Merriweather still gets its reminders built by hand, since parking instructions, entrance routing, and production logistics shift from show to show. Sugar-Moore admits the work is unglamorous on its own. Attendance rose once the practice became standard across the operation, and the lesson for any venue is the same: pre-show reminders belong on every show, across every room.
Twenty-five years of buyer history runs underneath
Every targeted send at I.M.P. is built on 25 years of buyer data, matched to specific shows and artists across all five venues.
When a new show gets announced, Sugar-Moore's team builds an affinity list by combining Hive's AI-suggested similar-artist segments with what he calls "just ridiculous knowledge in our heads" from two decades of booking rooms. AI handles the breadth while the team handles the judgment calls, and the dedicated email lands in the inboxes of fans most likely to actually care.
Most venues are sitting on some version of this same data and using it to blast the full list every time, when it could be powering targeted sends instead.
AI carries the scaffolding, humans carry the voice
Sugar-Moore's pushback on AI in marketing is the obvious one: the worry that it takes jobs away from people who do them well. The way I.M.P. uses AI is built around that concern.
The chatbot newsletter experiment told him everything he needed to know about AI as a writing tool, and he hasn't changed his mind, even while admitting he probably should ("I like the old school way a lot better personally, but I'm gonna get used to this at some point"). Where AI shows up in the operation is entirely behind the scenes. Hive's affinity suggestions shortcut segment-building so the team isn't manually pulling lists for every send, and automations handle pre-show reminder logic on the smaller venues along with the repetitive logistics that would otherwise eat the team's bandwidth.
Those automations have freed up the team to focus on the creative work of marketing the shows, which is where I.M.P.'s best output was always going to come from anyway.
What translates to smaller teams
The parts of I.M.P.'s approach that translate to teams without twelve people and years of data come down to a few choices.
Segment by artist affinity using whatever buyer history you have, even if it's three years instead of twenty-five, because a single blast to the full list stops scaling the moment it outgrows a niche.
Treat pre-show reminders as mandatory for every show across the board, with whatever automation your email platform offers handling the operational cost so the workload stays manageable on smaller rooms.
Distribute the writing across the team closest to the music, because voice is the part of an email program that's hardest to fake and the first thing fans notice when it's missing. Keep humans on the writing, and let AI handle the repetitive logistics sitting behind it.
The biggest unlock for most venues comes down to deciding the writing matters enough to give the team a real stake in it, which is exactly what I.M.P. did. 9:30 Club is celebrating its forty-sixth anniversary this year, with conversations already underway about the fiftieth. Email is a small piece of that, and the discipline behind how I.M.P. writes to its fans is part of why people keep coming back to a venue for forty-six years and counting.
This post is based on a conversation from Hive Backstage. Watch the full episode.
