How artists and managers evaluate livestreaming opportunities

It’s been a little over two months since we started seeing an unprecedented surge in livestreaming activity for music. Average concurrent viewership on Twitch music streams more than quadrupled within six weeks, while Instagram Live activity went up by more than 70%.

I call this the first wave of the livestreaming boom. In this wave, artists and event organizers were flocking in droves to copy and paste the sets they would have played in person at cancelled festivals and tours into a digital format. Desperate to fill the resulting financial and emotional void, artists seemed to take every opportunity they had to go live online and expand their social followings, often for free.

Now, we’re well into what I see as the second wave of music livestreaming — which isn’t as desperate or rosy, and is definitely more discerning.

Artists are starting to speak out more about not getting paid for their livestreaming appearances. Analysts are critiquing the staleness and lack of innovation in music livestreaming beyond traditional, linear performances that aren’t taking advantage of the medium’s various interactive features. As Mark Mulligan wrote: “If we start this journey thinking narrowly, the scale of opportunity will be constrained.”

Amidst all this flurry of conversation, I still haven’t found a clear framework for how artists should be evaluating livestreaming opportunities in the first place, as the initial hype settles down.

No one wants to go in blind anymore. As the landscape gets more and more crowded and saturated, how do artists know which opportunities are best for their own art and career goals? And even in a cutthroat attention economy, why might some artists decide not to go live?

Based on conversations with several artist managers, I’ve put together a checklist and flowchart that illustrate how a wide range of artists and their teams assess the myriad livestreaming opportunities that come their way — and, importantly, when they decide to say no.

Here’s the checklist below:

The wider backdrop behind this checklist is that the music industry needs to figure out how to ensure — in part through a systematic evaluation process — that livestreaming as a paradigm is here to stay and will add value, instead of being just a temporary stand-in for more traditional business models.

“What works on livestreaming platforms better than live?” David Lai, co-founder and co-president of Park Avenue Artists, an artist management firm whose clients include Joshua Bell, Yebba and Time For Three, tells me. “Rather than just replicating performances, we have to think about how to innovate, afford something new and make these platforms something that will stick around even after concerts come back.”

There are seven core questions driving artists’ and managers’ decisions around livestreaming opportunities, spread out across three main categories: Preference, Value and Logistics.

Preference

In the preference category, there’s only one question:

Are you comfortable with livestreaming?

It’s a simple yet essential idea. If an artist feels uncomfortable or out of their element in a livestreaming setting for whatever reason (e.g. personal privacy concerns, unfamiliarity with “stage presence” online), they don’t have to do it. Otherwise, viewers will likely notice the incongruity and tune out anyway.

“You don’t want to get to the point where the tech is telling you what to do,” Ross Michaels, co-founder and co-president of Park Avenue Artists, tells me. “We don’t want our artists to feel like they’re forcing themselves to do something just because everyone else is doing it. Instead, we’re thinking about how we can use tech in a cool way to support what they’re already doing. We start the conversation from finding the tech that best translates the artist’s DNA, as opposed to the other way around.”

Value

If an artist is ready to embrace livestreaming, the next questions to ask concern the added value the stream will provide.

To date, most value-oriented conversations about livestreaming have centered on a straightforward question:

Are you getting paid?

In a lot of instances, the answer to this question is no, which is a dealbreaker for many artists looking to make up for lost touring income.

This will become more of a make-or-break issue as platforms like Instagram roll out monetization for livestreams and ticketing apps like Dice allow artists to charge admission to virtual shows.

That said, as anyone in music will tell you, not all money is good money. There are a few other kinds of value that artists and managers are thinking about with respect to livestreaming, especially in the context of long-term career development.

Are the stream’s reach and cultural significance in line with your own marketing goals?

As the likes of Billboard and Chartmetric have pointed out, major livestreaming events like IG live battles can have significant, positive follow-on effects on both audio streams and social audience growth. But if you look at the noisy livestreaming landscape as a whole, this isn’t always the case.

In this vein, one choice some artists face is whether to go live on their own channels, to prioritize appearances in third-party, branded streams or to build a strategic experience around both outlets

For instance, independent music collective 99 Neighbors broadcasts a weekly radio show for three to five hours at a time on their own Twitch channel, but has also done a handful of performances as part of AriZona’s House Partea concert series on thei Instagram account. “40% of our monthly social growth came from the days after the first stream with AriZona,” Calhoun Rawlings, who manages 99 Neighbors, tells me.

Beyond audience size, engagement is also a make-or-break factor. Yes, it’s technically possible to reach many times more people globally through livestreaming than in person, and especially with a brand who already has wider reach than an individual artist. But unlike with an in-person show, it’s difficult to ensure viewers’ undivided attention on a free, livestreamed video, especially if there are multiple other apps and tabs open on their computer and/or phone screens.

Hence, like with streaming playlists, surface-level viewership metrics tell only part of the livestreaming story. “Some brands are asking our artists to perform for free, which might be cool for exposure — but if you want to build a true connection with your current fanbase, you can do that more effectively through your own accounts on Instagram and YouTube,” Kei Henderson, founder and head of marketing at artist management firm Since The 80s, which manages the likes of EarthGang, J.I.D. and Njomza, tells me.

Artist managers are doing more due diligence and looking into specific metrics like concurrent viewers and follower-to-engagement ratios on the host’s or brand’s social profiles before signing off on a given third-party livestream appearance.

“For our up-and-coming artists, we’re thinking about which opportunities will give them 100 new fans who will be with them forever, as opposed to 100,000 people who just passively look at the stream,” says Michaels. “As the industry gets more fragmented, it’s less about achieving mass scale and more about getting a concentration of audience that really gives a f*ck.”

Another source of value in a livestream that is intimately tied to audience engagement is cultural clout. For instance, a branded stream with a corporation like Mastercard or United Airlines might come with good pay, but little to no audience interaction. In contrast, Michaels tells me, a live session with more focused, musically-oriented brands like NPR’s Tiny Desk or The FADER might pay artists less, but are much more culturally significant because they act as the ideal trifecta of online streaming, press placements and TV appearances.

“If we tell streaming services that our artist is doing a FADER live session, they see it as cultural capital,” says Michaels. “They’re like, ‘Oh, if The FADER gave her a thumbs up, we need to give her a thumbs up too and put her in more of our playlists.’”

Logistics

Once you’ve figured out that a livestreaming opportunity aligns with your values and goals, logistics come next.

These kinds of questions encompass specific, prohibitive clauses in performance contracts, as well as details around the stream’s production itself.

Will you own the stream’s content?

Music livestreaming still suffers from a lack of clear communication and regulation around copyright protection of recorded music. Facebook and Instagram recently clarified their music copyright policies on their respective websites, which reportedly include a 90-second limit on how long pre-recorded songs can play in live DJ sets.

But aside from copyright enforcement issues, there’s another spin on IP that more artist managers are considering in their livestreaming agreements: Ownership of the stream’s contents once it goes on demand.

As I previously covered, major labels already strike this kind of agreement with larger festivals like Coachella, in that the labels own the rights to the archival recordings of their artists’ sets. This kind of arrangement could also be valuable on the level of individual artists who want to make sure they can use the content of a sponsored stream in future marketing campaigns.

For instance, with deals such as Joshua Bell’s free livestreaming partnership with Lincoln Center, “we need to own the content and be able to put it on our own properties, but can let partners cross-post or give them a 30-day exclusive,” says Lai.

Are there any unreasonable (or reasonable) exclusivity concerns?

Livestreaming has a reputation for being an open, free mode of communication. But a growing number of platforms and event organizers are instating exclusivity clauses into their agreements that limit artists’ ability to be active elsewhere on the internet.

For instance, Twitch’s terms of service prohibit its Affiliates — who can earn money on the platform through direct subscriptions and the in-app Bits currency — from simulcasting their streams on another platform, and from posting archived Twitch content on any other platform within a 24-hour window after a given Twitch stream concludes. This can be a significant obstacle for artists who want to maximize their reach and broadcast to more than one platform at the same time.

On the event level, Dutch DJ Headhunterz had to pull out of EDC’s livestream in mid-May “due to a miscommunication regarding the exclusivity of the set.” This feels like how radius clauses work for in-person festivals, but using the radius of time and platform as opposed to physical place. Rawlings tells me that other artists “have had to turn down branded livestreams because they have long-term endorsement deals with other competing brands.”

Are the livestream’s technical setup and production value appropriate for your music?

If the value of your livestream is mostly in fan communication and engagement than in music per se, then audio quality doesn’t matter.

But if it’s music-centric, you need to be mindful of whether your own setup, and/or that of the third-party event host, will do your performance justice. (See the first iteration of the Teddy Riley vs. Babyface IG battle for an example of what not to do.)

“A lot of livestreams today are set up for acoustic artists,” says Rawlings. “It’s easy to set up a camera on a guy with a guitar. For 99 Neighbors, they’re doing live vocals and autotune and running sound through their DJ controllers. If all a stream organizer is doing is telling us to request to join their IG live, you can lose quite a bit of audio quality there. Going live on apps like Instagram can also create some formatting issues, because you don’t have the full 16:9 frame to showcase the artist and their setup. Some larger groups have had issues with that.”

Production value and tech specs will become increasingly important in the coming weeks as artists and event organizers think critically about how to make livestreams more memorable and worth watching — let alone worth paying for.

Are the organizers putting enough marketing weight behind the stream?

Last but not least, an event can’t be memorable if no one shows up.

Unlike in the first wave of livestreaming, those who want to succeed in the second wave are doing noticeably more planning in advance. Multiple managers I spoke with recommended confirming official branded livestream performances at least a few weeks out, and getting social and promotional assets around a week ahead of time to start marketing the event both internally and externally.

But this can sometimes be difficult for short-staffed or over-committed brands who only have the bandwidth to promote their streams last-minute. “We’ve done a lot of streams where we only got our assets the day of, so we couldn’t do that much,” says Rawlings. “Some brands are also doing livestreams five to six times a week, and don’t have a lot of lead time to promote each of them. That’s not super appealing for the artist to be one of those six, especially if it’s an unpaid opportunity without a ton of room for growth.”

To streamline marketing and avoid these pitfalls, some managers want to see the future of livestreaming fall more and more into artists’ hands, rather than into those of big-tech platforms like Amazon, Facebook and Google.

“Artists will need to create their own destinations for their fans on top of YouTube, Twitch and IG Live being a thing,” says Henderson. “I think it will have to be far more direct-to-fan in the future.”