Every artist in the world seems to have jumped on livestreaming during lockdown – in part as a way to let their creativity out but also to remind the general public that, yes, they still exist and would like you to remember that. YouTube, Zoom, Facebook and Instagram have never seen as much music being live streamed as they have in the past few weeks.
Most of that music is being streamed for free (embellished with the occasional ad), with an option to donate to a nominated charity. Erykah Badu, however, is using the boom in livestreaming to see if – finally – a large-scale subscription business can exist here. She will be hosting regular concerts live from her bedroom in Dallas.
She has called it Badu’s Quarantine Concert Series: Apocalypse, Live From Badubotron which rather suggests this is a workaround while live shows are cancelled – but it could prove to have potential.
She has an interesting pricing strategy to get it all rolling. It cost $1 for the first concert in March, then rising to $2 for the second and $3 for the third.
She is, however, very clear that this is a dry run and should be approached as such. “This is an experiment,” she writes. “There’s nobody in between me and that dollar. I realised there was no social platform where you could interact, choose what I sing, where I am when I do it, doing that, I had to create my own paywall […] Instead of going through streaming services, who handle the payments from customers and pay me, the artist, 30 cents or 10 cents, I could directly do business with the people I am serving. It’s a magnificent feeling…”
Badu is also making tie-in Quarantine Concert Series merchandise available. Hoodies are selling for $50 and T-shirts for $25. When Music Ally checked, a third of the line had already sold out.
As with Novelist, this is a time when acts are testing the market willingness for direct subscriptions, in part because most of their other revenues streams are on hold. But they also serve as a reminder to consumers that not everything online has to be free and that good content is worth paying for.
