Eleven Years Behind the Sites, Apps and Data of a Festival Promoter
Thousands of shows a year, a new launch every season, and a platform built so each one is a configuration, not a project.
A Business That Runs on Launch Days
Disco Donnie Presents has produced electronic music events for three decades, from club nights to multi-day destination festivals, and today produces thousands of shows a year across hundreds of markets. Every one of them begins the same way: a lineup is announced, a website goes live, and tickets go on sale in a burst of traffic that would embarrass most e-commerce sites. If the site is slow, fans go elsewhere. If the ticket data is wrong, the marketing team is flying blind for the most important week of the event.
When we started working together in 2015 the company was part of a large public entertainment group, later reorganized as LiveStyle, and had a portfolio of festival brands that each needed a site, an app and a data feed, every season, on a schedule set by artists and venues rather than by engineers. The founder bought the company back in 2020 and it now trades as Disco Presents. Through the ownership changes, the launches never stopped, and neither did we. Eleven years on, we are still the team behind the sites.
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One Platform, Many Festivals
The first decision set the tone for everything after it. Rather than build each festival site from scratch, we modeled a large WordPress multisite so a new festival could be launched from a shared platform, with its own design and content but common infrastructure, tooling and hosting. A festival season became a series of configurations instead of a series of projects, and a fix made for one brand reached all of them.
The same thinking produced a shared mobile application platform for festival attendees, which is its own story, and a lineup discovery experience built in React that let fans sort a festival's artists by billing, stage and schedule. Both were built once and reused across the portfolio.
What We Build and Run
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Festival sites, every season
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Sites for Freaky Deaky, Ubbi Dubbi, Lights All Night, Sunset Music Festival and dozens more, launched each year on the event's calendar: schedule by stage, tickets, directions, artist lineups and the fixed-scope updates a returning festival needs.
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Ticketing data, collected automatically
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Sales data pulled from ticketing platforms into the marketing systems of the day, starting with Eventbrite into Salesforce Marketing Cloud and, more recently, SeatGeek ticket counts aggregated daily across venues and agents into shared reports and the CRM, with special handling for platforms that offer no API.
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Marketing automation and CRM
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A HubSpot implementation covering event lifecycle marketing, automated confirmation workflows, venue calendar synchronization and the event management system's data, so a campaign for a show is built from live data rather than a spreadsheet.
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Conversion tracking that respects privacy
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Server-side purchase tracking through Meta's Conversion API, with hashed buyer identities and limited data use for state privacy laws, replacing a third-party pixel with something the company controls.
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Reliability under sale-day load
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Edge caching, capacity monitoring and real-time inventory sync across festivals, so an on-sale announcement is an event for the fans and a non-event for the infrastructure.
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A new home for the brand
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The 2026 redesign of the company's own site with the Zajno design studio, with music integration through the Beatport API and event pages that change as an event moves through its lifecycle.
How a Decade-Long Engagement Works
The relationship has outlasted three ownership structures because of how it is run, not because of any one system. Most work is scoped as fixed-price projects tied to a specific festival and season, so the company always knows what a launch costs. Between launches, a small retainer covers the data pipelines and the integrations that keep running when no site is being built. And the same people have been on the account for years, which is why they catch lineup typos the client's own team misses.
Evan Bailey, the company's vice president, describes what that buys him: "Taking web sort of out of the equation is a big stress reliever, and it allows us to look at other areas of our experience with our fans." On the other side of the ledger: "They've worked through the night to help us deliver new festival properties, even sometimes the next day."
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When This Model Fits, and When It Does Not
A long-running outside team is the wrong choice for a company whose product is its website; that company should own its engineering. It is also wrong when requirements are stable and a launch happens once a year, because a well-built site and a maintenance contract will do.
It fits when the calendar is relentless, the brands are many and the in-house team's expertise is the event, not the software. Promoters, sports properties, seasonal retailers and destination marketers all live that way. In those businesses the useful question is not who builds the next site but how the next twenty get built without twenty projects, and that is a platform decision before it is a vendor decision.
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More from the live entertainment work.
The mobile app platform built for festival attendees across the portfolio.
Live Entertainment and Ticketing Platforms
A UDX Talks session on the technology behind live events.
Elevating the Live Entertainment Experience
How we deliver digital solutions for the industry.
What music festivals and pickleball tournaments have in common.
How we run large WordPress platforms in production.
Every festival project, searchable by year and technology.
Launching More Than One Thing a Year?
Tell us what your calendar looks like and how launches happen today. We will tell you whether a shared platform would pay for itself, and what the first season on it would involve.