Crossing the streams

Live streaming has become one of the main – and in some cases the only – outlet for musicians to perform during the pandemic. But how viable is it as a profit-making enterprise?

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James Ehnes has been live-streaming on the Dreamstage platform

COURTESY DREAMSTAGE

With concert venues around the world still shut to audiences more than a year into the pandemic, live streaming has been a powerful way for artists to stay connected with their fans and reach new audiences. But whether it’s individual performers recording themselves at home and inviting donations from the audience, or ensembles being professionally filmed and recorded for ticketed events delivered through high-tech streaming platforms, can the income from live streaming make up for revenues lost from cancelled concerts? By the beginning of April, London’s Wigmore Hall will have live-streamed 160 concerts since June 2020, all of them free to view in HD, with audiences encouraged to make donations. But chief executive John Gilhooly, in an interview with the Financial Times in January, was brutal in his assessment of live streaming as a money maker. Noting that the £1m the hall aims to raise from a year of donations represents only around one seventh of its usual annual income, Gilhooly said: ‘Apart from the deluded, no one can say streaming concerts pays.’

If no one in classical music is getting rich from live streaming, there are still examples of individual artists and small organisations making the format pay. At the beginning of the pandemic in the UK, performers who were quick to embrace live streaming benefited from the goodwill and generosity of audiences. From March to July 2020, Chamber Music Scotland (CMS) presented a series of 15 Streaming Home Concerts featuring 25 performers. Concerts recorded in the artists’ homes were streamed on YouTube, with viewers encouraged to donate in lieu of a ticket. The series reached an audience of 33,000 people worldwide and raised around £10,000 in donations, which meant that the musicians were paid at least as well as they would have been in a normal concert setting, according to CMS chief executive Paul Tracey. ‘The artists received 100 per cent of the revenue,’ he says. ‘We covered the cost of a box of streaming equipment, which travelled between each performer, and we paid for a tech person to look after the streaming remotely.’

Composer Freya Waley-Cohen, together with her violinist sister Tamsin Waley-Cohen and pianist George Fu, launched a similar series of informal live-streamed concerts called Living Room Live, which featured 30 performances between March and August 2020. Short concerts of 20 to 30 minutes by artists including violinist Rachel Podger, violist Ann Beilby and cellist Laura van der Heijden were streamed on Facebook and on a dedicated website.

Concerts were free to view, but donations were invited via regular Patreon payments or through larger one-time donations. Freya Waley-Cohen says that the level of donations rose and fell with the waves of public mood during the first long lockdown in the UK. ‘Although there was never enough for the three of us to be paid as organisers, we were able to offer artists a fee comparable to what they might receive for 30 minutes of a normal recital in some halls.’

‘We’ve seen artists make in one stream eight or ten times what they could in a normal concert’ 

While live streaming for donations has continued throughout the pandemic, musicians and small organisations have also turned to subscription and ticketed models, an option made easier by the launch of integrated ticketing and streaming platforms such as Tidze. New York-based cellist Jan Vogler is co-founder of the ticketed live-streaming platform Dreamstage, which launched in August 2020 and has so far presented more than 45 concerts, by artists ranging from Christian Tetzlaff and James Ehnes to young violinists Kevin Zhu and Nathan Meltzer. Vogler wanted the streaming quality, especially the audio reproduction, to be far better than what YouTube or Facebook could offer, so Dreamstage invested heavily in the technology to be able to stream in HD with hi-fi sound. Despite the higher production costs, Vogler says that typically around 80 per cent of ticket revenue goes to the artist, with audience numbers usually in the high hundreds or low thousands. ‘Classical musicians are not going to get rich from live streaming in the immediate future,’ he accepts, ‘but some young artists, who might only be receiving modest fees in concert series across the world and would need to find a cheap way to get to those cities in the first place, have done extremely well with streaming. In certain cases, we’ve even seen a young artist make in one stream eight or ten times what they could make from a normal concert.’

Live streaming can also act as an online gateway to selling an artist’s products and services. Classical music entrepreneur and marketing consultant David Taylor says: ‘Success in the digital space doesn’t come from trying to replicate the direct transactional model of in-person events, but from having multiple income streams. So in addition to revenue from tickets or donations, you can be monetising that attention by working with third-party businesses who want to advertise.’ Taylor argues that the consumer technology platforms that are now available make it easier for individual artists and small groups to be more creative and become more financially viable. And he urges performers to continue live streaming after the pandemic as a way of staying connected with existing audiences and building new audiences in advance in places where artists want to tour, to make such tours economically worthwhile. ‘In terms of convincing people to come to venues to hear live music,’ he says, ‘live streaming and communicating well in the digital space will be essential to surviving the next ten years.’

ERIC RICHMOND