😷 Learnings from a livestream: Pip Blom
Numbers, revenue, and experiences behind a livestream. Guest post by Erwin Blom.
Special edition!
The following is a translation of a recent edition of the Fast Moving Targets newsletter by Erwin Blom, which appeared in Dutch.
Erwin is well-known in The Netherlands as a new media expert and he’s the father of Pip and Tender who play together in a band called Pip Blom. His recent newsletter sheds a great light on the data around their recent livestreamed performance at the Ramsgate Music Hall in England. So, with Erwin’s permission, we translated all the info, so you can get a better understanding of what livestreaming means for an upcoming band.
Learnings from a livestream
Click here for the Dutch version.
116 people bought a ticket. Most people paid 9 euro for it. Pip Blom Backstage members were allowed to enter for 7 or 5 euro. Is that a lot? Is it a little? It shows that people want to pay for livestreams of a concert. The peak of sales happened, as is often the case, in the last 24 hours before the concert.
We ran the ticket sales through Guts. This was a great experience and it functioned really well. Advantage: all the buyer data now belongs to the band, not the ticketing company. Also have a look at the Dutch company 24streamer if you’d also like to try out a livestream.
We streamed through Vimeo, because you can easily protect your stream in combination with Guts. Just beware of the rascals at Vimeo, because they’ll try to make you pay the monthly fee of 70 euro in one go on the yearly plan. Luckily, they have a trial month. That will teach them ;-).
What worked really well through Vimeo was remote collaboration. The video was streamed from Ramsgate and in Amsterdam I took care of the titles (what song was playing at which point in the set).
Pip Blom has a lot of fans abroad. You could also see this in the ticket sales. With streaming you can reach places where you otherwise wouldn’t go. From Australia to Finland, there were viewers from 10 different countries, with most of them coming from the UK.
Through Guts you can also do “upsells” - which means selling extras. Di-rect (another Dutch band) sold packages of beer and wine, but for an international band that’s a bit harder. However, of the 116 buyers, 15 also bought a poster for 9 euro that they’ll get sent to their home. Great to play around with this concept.
100% of the ticket sales came through the band’s channels. So by sending out the newsletter, highlighting it on social media, etc. This show you can actually do-it-yourself. But what can you accomplish with the right media partners? The band sells out venues in London with a capacity of 800 and in Amsterdam of 400, which means it must be possible to get to greater numbers. Something for another time.
Most importantly: the band really enjoyed doing it (finally something positive), the venue and crew were happy that something was happening in their venue, and the viewers had a great time. No, this is a long way from replacing cancelled concerts and if you really do a cost-benefit analysis it’s still a tough case, but it’s great to have the first 1,000 euro in the books with a livestream. And more will definitely follow!
Thanks for allowing us to share a translated version to MUSIC x CORONA, Erwin Blom!
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MUSIC x CORONA is composed by Bas Grasmayer and Maarten Walraven.
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