If just a few dozen people showed up to your free livestream, would anybody buy a ticket to your online concert?
By: Music Interaction Network
Tags: Live Music, Music Business, Live Streaming, Music Industry, Livestream

If just a few dozen people showed up to your free livestream, would anybody buy a ticket to your online concert? Show4me Music Interaction Network Aug 7, 2020·3 min read

Whether people are ready, willing or in a position to spend on your music and art has been the discussion for decades if not centuries. The general consensus in the creative community is — if you love doing it, doesn’t mean it’s not work and you should not be compensated.

As an artist, you can charge for your work performing your music live whether it’s online or offline.

And with the COVID-19 pandemic not wrapping up for months now, many musicians and bands have been stranded with much reduced and sometimes completely cut off sources of income from their music.

To a relief of the community, numerous tools to monetize music online are available for musicians and their teams, one of such tools — ticketed online concerts.

As global lockdowns reached the western hemisphere, live shows got cancelled and postponed indefinitely. Musicians started holding online events and shows to help uplift the mood and help raise funds for worthy charitable causes.

We heard the first whispers of tipping probably in April or early May, when the talk of the financial losses the industry faced due to the drastically reduced opportunities to earn new money on gigs, live performances, festivals, parties, events, and the like got louder.

As some of the streams of income dried up, it was time to look for new ones. And ticketed online shows emerged as a temporary but sturdy solution. Musicians got an outlet for work and play, fans got to support their beloved acts and discover new ones, the demand grew.

Now, a number of online platforms offer ticketed concert streaming, and Show4me is one of them. What we hear often from the musicians just arriving to our platform is, but what if no one buys the ticket?

The math is simple, 10 fans buying $10 ticket each equal $100 worth in ticket sales. 20 fans can bring in $200, and so on.

Besides general admission tickets, many musicians on our platform offer a variety of ticket tiers — tickets with merch, meet-and-greets, video shoutouts, pre-party hangouts, interviews, afterparties, etc. The variety is only limited by your imagination (and legislation, as always).

It’s often not the actual size of the fanbase an artist has that defines if their online concert will be profitable/attract enough attendees, it’s event promotion. Only mentioning your upcoming stream once in passing on one of your social media channels is not going to cut it.

You have to tease what’s to come, remind people multiple times, involve fans in the process of planning and preparing the show, make the event the very center of your online communications in the weeks leading up to the concert.

And let’s be real, you also probably need to work on growing your fanbase. While that’s a topic for a separate conversation, we’ve encountered quite a number of great videos (actually, three) that outline exactly what you need to do and how in a succinct and entertaining manner, so head on over to our blog post with the extended version of this post, all the links to the sources you need, and additional advice on the issue.