When LiveNation purchased Joel and Benji Madden’s streaming platform Veeps back in January, the writing was on the wall. As music and event spaces reopen, partnerships between livestreaming companies and venues are shaping the new hybrid business landscape.
Veeps is busy equipping more than 60 Live Nation concert venues – The Fillmore in San Francisco and Philadelphia, House of Blues in Chicago and New Orleans and The Wiltern in LA among them – to offer turnkey streaming. New From the Wiltern shows got underway on Veeps in May with digital tickets running $15 a pop.
YouTube last month announced a new 6,000-seat theater in LA’s Hollywood Park complex that will not only bear the company’s name but also lands it rights to stream events that take place there. Upcoming shows at the venue include Black Pumas, Devo, Marina and two sold-out Louis Tomlinson concerts.
“YouTube Theater will drive the uniqueness of YouTube by combining physical events that bring creators and fans together, while simultaneously sharing that same event experience with our 2 billion global monthly users through livestreams and VOD content,” says Angela Courtin, VP of brand marketing at YouTube.
Among other recent deals, streaming platform Mandolin inked an exclusive two-year partnership with City Winery to stream concerts from its eight music venues around the country. The City Winery Nashville location will be home to an Amy Winehouse benefit tribute on July 23.
DreamStage, which has streamed shows from Train to Yo-Yo Ma, inked a deal with Nashville-based venue Basement East and is installing tech including five cameras that can be operated remotely at the 500-seat venue this month.
Equipping the venue is a “substantial capital investment for us,” says Jan Vogler, DreamStage artistic director. But, he notes, the payoff is potentially big. “Basically any artist who wants to livestream from that venue will first come to us.”
“Exclusive” Is a Relative Term
While many of these new deals are being touted as “exclusive,” the term isn’t exactly accurate. The reason? Streaming agreements generally are hammered out by performers and management, not the venue.
“Simply put, if the artist or management wants to scale the audience and increase the potential revenue return, the stream will happen with or without the venue having a deal with a streaming platform,” says Ari Evans, founder and CEO of streaming platform Maestro, which delivered last year’s Billie Eilish livestream. “In all of our partnerships, the venue is and was, for the most part, irrelevant from any practical deal-making standpoint.”
Evans says he’s all for venues making it easier for artists to stream and believes “it would be wise for them to be cut into upside if they can measurably demonstrate their own marketing engines or built-in audiences to drive sales and ultimately value for the artist in exchange.” But, he notes, it’s complicated.
“I am expecting big promoters like Live Nation to add streaming equivalents of radius clauses to their agreements. So, right out of the gate, if you’re an even remotely recognizable artist on a Live Nation tour, there’s an element of an elephant in the room non-starter in this case, which groups like Veeps would likely benefit from given their ongoing relationship.”
“The way we are approaching the venue partnerships is… We know the venues aren’t going to necessarily stream every show, whether that’s with us, or at all,” says Pete Turim, Mandolin VP of sales and partnerships. “If you’re going to stream, first choice is Mandolin and we’re going to make it really easy and most cost-effective for the artist to choose Mandolin. Where there is an alternative option, we’ll work through that on case-by-case basis. At the end of the day, we’re here to help the venues.”
Aside from City Winery locales, Mandolin has also installed equipment in Nashville’s Ryman and Wolf Trap outside of DC, among others. Turim notes that the relationships Mandolin is cementing with venues don’t start and end with cameras.
“We’re willing to help venues get equipped, but we’re also serving as consultants, whatever the venues need,” he says. “It needs to be turnkey, it needs to be easy and it needs to be cost-effective for the artist and the venue to both make money and put out a successful stream.”
Vogler says DreamStage most likely would get the contract should an artist elect to stream from Basement East, “except if somebody has a specific partnership already and asks to stream with a different partner. Then we will work out a deal where maybe the other platform pays a little bit for using our cameras,” he adds. “We are not out there to handcuff anyone. We want to give the venue more freedom by being able to have people all over the world participate.”
After all the livestreaming learnings accelerated during the pandemic, “The next step is to educate,” he says. “And often the first one to educate is the first one to gain the trust of the venues, so we are doing a lot of education around the venues and artists – and they are often very open to start a partnership.”
New Partnerships – New Opportunities
Beyond the core necessity of high-quality audio and video production, streaming platform-venue relationships have the ability to jumpstart more streams, more artist participation and more interaction from fans who can’t make a live show due to geographic, financial or other restraints, says Volger, who is also a performing classical cellist.
Physical size of venue partner, in this case, is less important than ambience.
“The venues might be a starting point for the artist. They come to the venue and see the venue has a partnership and they can get more involved,” Volger says. “It’s the artist’s ideal to have more people participate. Think, for example, about a little jazz club in New York, and a person who lives in the countryside in Poland or Germany and is a big jazz fan like my father was and would want to hear these concerts. They can now participate at a moderate price.”
“What you’ll see over time is that it’s going to be a competitive advantage for venues to be equipped to provide these experiences. There’s this whole new bucket of digital experiences, opportunities from artist and fan connection as well as monetization opportunities,” Turim says.
“What it comes down to is, we know the digital fan is not only the person sitting on their couch,” he adds. “In fact they may be going to the actual show, but they want to take their phone and preorder merch to pick up when they get there, or order merch and have it delivered to their house so they don’t have to carry it around. Or vote on a song for the encore. There are a lot of ways the digital fans can interact at the venue and get that show on video on demand to watch at a later time.”
As the pool of interactive offerings grows, “We recommend client experimentation using our rich set of out-of-the-box tools to determine what is the best fit for their brand KPIs and unique audiences,” says Evans, who cites Maestro services including its Shopify integration as big draws.
“Little else matters nearly as much as helping the artists and management groups become educated on the staggeringly immense opportunity that streaming represents from an overall fan experience and bottom line revenue standpoint,” he says.
“Most of the artists we’ve worked with have been understandably quiet about their earnings, preferring to highlight more the unique experience they provide virtual fans. We can appreciate their perspective, but if the broader industry knew some of these jaw-dropping revenue numbers, I think we’d see more rapid adoption of the virtual and/or hybrid event strategy.”