Incrowd app launch provides 5x Festival attendees with a pick-your-path journey to remember

Beyond its presence as the third largest pan-ethnic group in the Metro Vancouver area – one that grew 29.6 percent in size between 2016 and 2021, with a similar rate of increase anticipated in future years – the South Asian community is also a hotbed for homegrown and globally-inspired musical innovation.

Sustainable growth and innovation requires investments in infrastructure. Local artist, producer, and 5X Festival Executive Director Tarun Nayar is acutely aware of the impact that targeted investments like these can have on the audience experience.

Since 2017, the 5X Festival has offered an annualized celebration of South Asian youth art, culture, and heritage taking place in Surrey, Vancouver, and other BC locales. In an effort to deepen its connection to an audience that has come to crave agency and autonomy when consuming content, the Festival has recently launched Incrowd, a new app and streaming platform designed to optimize the remote audience experience. Amplify BC’s Music Industry Initiatives program has invested in this project.

Incrowd’s user experience has been optimized to be simple, intuitive, and entirely personal.

Envisioned as both a showcase and launching pad for South Asian art and artists, the 5X Festival shines a light on content and programming that is both home-grown and drawn from further afield globally.  In recent years, the Festival has expanded to encompass multiple days, venues, and modes of artistic expression – music, art, fashion, and digital culture – that convene and connect attendees from all walks of life. The event is now the largest youth-focused South Asian event in Canada.

Tarun notes, “Surrey, in particular, has been an epicenter for Punjabi music for decades, often exporting stars to the UK and India. But, there were virtually no local organizations championing this talent pool. We’ve been growing steadily over the last few years (pandemic notwithstanding!), serving the ever-growing diasporic and international student communities in BC through live music events, an online magazine, and various community activations.”

But, why Incrowd? Why now?

Tarun continues, “Like many live events during the pandemic, we had to re-imagine what a resilient and extended event could look like in a digital way. The best part of live events is being there in person to feel engaged and connected — and we wanted to create technology that could take the basic principles of that, and be better for people who aren’t there in person. We wanted a product that could embrace engagement, authenticity, and the messiness of real moments that you can choose to participate in or not when you’re somewhere in real life.”

Users can keep track of multiple events, pause and revisit content, and save items to watch in a curated sequence.

Incrowd’s rationale is accordingly simple: to optimize the depth and agency of the audience experience. Recognizing that, in the continued wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, audience comfort with live events continues to fluctuate, Incrowd enables audiences to experience live events on a remote basis in a meaningful way. It also enables those attending in person to pick and choose curated digital content to consume alongside what is occurring live in order to add depth and value to the total experience. Put another way, Incrowd is one part event concierge, one part informational resource and guide, and one part ‘choose-your-own-adventure’ novel. In keeping with the Festival’s own mission statement, Incrowd enables its users to “create magic, be bold, and come together.”

Incrowd is already available for iPhone download in the App Store, with a public launch for Android devices slated for the near future. Users are also invited to book free 30-minute demo appointments in advance of the Festival, with future tiered cost structure planning still underway. Incrowd will enjoy its inaugural public launch in tandem with the 2023 5X Festival, which spans June 11-18 in Surrey and Vancouver.

You can learn more about 5X Festival here, and more about Incrowd here.

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