Three top music livestream execs offer key insights [VIDEO]

Three top executives working in different corners of music live streaming offered key insights into the rapidly evolving sector during a recent Music Ally Japan Digital Summit.

The Music Alley panel was chaired by MQA CEO Mike Jbara with Claire Mas, the COO of Driift; Tim Westergren, the CEO of Sessions; and Julian Mitelberg, co-founder and managing partner at Bandsintown Group. 

Each executive and their companies bring something different to music live streaming.

• For Westergren, it’s his experience founding Pandora and now the gamified indie artist streaming platform Sessions.
• Mitelberg helped build Bandsintown’s community of 60 million live music fans and more than half a million artists and then shepherded both into livestreaming at an impressive pace and scale.
• Mas concentrates Driift of high production streaming events for high-profile clients.

Watch the video above to learn more, but here are some key takeaways:

Intimacy

“Surprisingly for the fans, some are extremely satisfied with a very simple show for their favorite artist,” said Bandsintown’s Julien Mitelberg. “That’s actually what they’re looking for because they’ve been to big concerts and they’ve seen this artist before, but not in a more intimate sort of context.”

Label Interest

“A lot of the labels at the start were trying to do it themselves, had a go, it didn’t really work out and they’re not so interested in it anymore,” said Claire Mas of Driift. Instead, she said labels are now trying to figure out how to piggyback on existing events much as they do with tours

Exploitation, not growth

“Livestreaming has not been a growth category: it’s been an exploitation category,” according to Tim Westergren. “Artists come to it with an existing audience and a mailing list and a social network and whatnot, and they do an event, they do largely free, organic marketing, and they peel off some small percentage and convert them to viewers. And they can do that a few times, and then it runs out of gas. That’s not really changing anything.”

Westergren closed the panel with some advice:

“For this to really thrive, I think artists need to see this as an interactive experience. That is where in the long term there’s a healthy opportunity.”

“What works is engaging and actually seeing this as not a one-way experience, and if you do that and do that well, and you establish consistency, and you’re good at what you do, there’s a lot of opportunity.”