Q’s With Jim Lucchese, CEO Of Sofar Sounds

What motivates us – and I why I took the role of CEO here – is that we look at artists as our customer, specifically artists that are predominantly local, independent. They are the ones that give your hometown/city its soul, that create that unique connection with a place. Often those are not necessarily the musicians getting all the press coverage. We are focused on these artists who make the vast majority – if not all their money – from live performances in smaller cap venues and the merch that flows from that.

So the first thing we did more than one month ago, when we made the decision to cancel all shows, is we decided to advance the performance fees. That decision meant cancelling performances for about 3,000 artists around the world with a loose agreement essentially saying “Hey, when we’re back to doing shows, we’d love to have you back in the room.” We figured that was just a statement of their importance to us and a small token that can hopefully help out with whatever they are doing in the meantime. 

And the other thing we are doing right now is the listening room. Fortunately, we were already in the process of investing more in in video when we started (pivoting toward digital). 

The typical live format for a Sofar show is about three artists each playing a 20-minute set. So prior to COVID-19 we felt those kinds of small rooms where you could see a multi-band bill in a listening room, not a loud bar, were going away in a lot of cities. I view Sofar as grassroots way of creating those spaces again, and from an artist’s standpoint, to build a fanbase live is getting harder and harder.

So a small percentage of the shows we do, we record and put them on YouTube as a way to extend what happened in that small room with 65 people to reach a bunch more people on YouTube. Fortunately, we had ramped up and hired a few people who were focused on that prior to the pandemic. So within a week, after we canceled everything, we launched The Listening Room to create a place where we can showcase Sofar artists from around the world and promote those livestreams to all of our audience which – across our graph of socials, email and YouTube – is about 5 million people.  The shows are not ticketed, they are free to watch. 

There is the option for fans to support the artist and I have been really pleasantly surprised with how giving fans have been. On average artists are making $600 for a 30-minute livestream set. The average donation is $20, which means it is well distributed. 100% of that money goes to the artist, plus a performance fee from Sofar.

Our goal in the listening room is to showcase artists that typically play Sofar.  We are averaging about a show per day right now. We have three time zones we program to. Last week we had an artist from Ibiza at 11 a.m. EST, Liverpool at 3 p.m. EST and Boston at 7 p.m. EST. I’d love to have that every day. 

Prior to doing this digital listening room artist booking was pretty distributed. Folks in the local city made booking decisions. We do have a central booking platform, some tech is used, but they made their own booking decisions. 

So we went from doing 100 shows a night around the world, with three artists at each show – essentially 300 slots a night – now we have gone to one, two or three slots a night. 

It’s been a little chaotic in working with all our different city teams to coordinate with artists and get the programming/scheduling together. I’d say it has been a messy hustle of our video team connecting with those local teams and trying to give priority to artists who had shows canceled. 

Also, we want to support artists performing from home. So we are checking in with artists that aren’t comfortable, our production team works with them on the A/V side: Sound quality, lights, if they have to change settings, that stuff is being done beforehand. We had an artist from Turkey this week and she was having network issues, so they had to work with her a bunch beforehand. So we are still figuring out how to do that as efficiently as possible while still making sure we are programming the most diverse lineups possible. 

For us, right now, the criteria is that these are artists that have performed Sofars before, that we know and we want to give them a stage. It’s definitely not about the popularity of the artist by some other metric. We want to afford opportunities to our community of about 30,000 or so artists who have played with Sofar in the last year and a half. There were than 20,000 last year and 3,000 who have had shows canceled so far this year. 

So there’s certainly no shortage of incredible talent from around the world to showcase, it’s more on the operational side: we were building the listening room in about 5 days, then starting the program, then getting into a rhythm with artists from around the world. 

Being able to ensure a level of production quality that an artist and audience feels good about, when you’re doing it in such a distributed way, has been a challenge that we’ve worked through and continue to work through. 

But I’m really impressed with, thankful to our audiences, that they are being so generous. One of these gigs means real money for these artists. We went into this not knowing how that was going to go and I have been pleasantly surprised with how it’s going.

We had 2,000 artists last year who did more than five shows outside a 100-mile radius. These people are touring and playing sub-100 capacity venues. They are making a living playing live. A lot of those artists who I know are also teachers. Their livelihood is really threatened right now. So this is real money, helping them make rent, helping them get through this. 

But we recognize that the listening room alone isn’t going to cover the breadth of artists that we work with, that’s part of the reason why we launched the global artist fund, which is targeting raising $250,000 dollars with $250 grants each to artists that make their livings playing small-cap venues. We’ve just kicked that off, we’re actually partnering with another music nonprofit to administer that fund, we’re basically going to be supporting and promoting it. But trying to figure out how to provide a depth of support with breadth, the listening room combined with the global artist fund is an effort to try and broaden the number of artists we can provide some support for. 

Totally. So I’ve been in this job a year and one of the areas that I’ve always seen so much opportunity in is that what happens in that room is very special, the audience is so locked in for the performances, but there are only 65 people in the room, and you had to be there. Those videos have emerged really organically, we started recording video and putting them up on YouTube, and now there’s a million or so  subscribers. That happened without a whole lot of planning, it just kind of happened. 

So that was one of the areas we were already building a team and capability for, thinking ‘How can we do more of that? How can we take what happened in that room and amplify it, help the artist promote themself beyond the 65 people in that room.’ So we did a bunch of work on our content operations and the production side of things, and we were really just ramping that up, I mean we had just hired our head of production two weeks before all of this went down. 

So what was probably a three-to-six month roadmap for him became a five-day roadmap to really lean into what we could be doing digitally. The idea of continuing to use livestreams and video as a way to broaden the stage for Sofar artists is something we will absolutely continue to do after this crisis behind us. And to the extent it continues to be another monetization opportunity for these artists, we will continue to do that as well. 

I look at this as very complementary to our ability to fill rooms for artists in 400 cities around the world. I don’t see a livestream experience as a replacement for sitting in a room with friends, discovering an artist for the first time and talking to them afterwards, the intimacy of what happens at a Sofar show. It’s not a replacement for that, but it can continue to be a great complement for it when we are lucky enough to be doing shows again. 

I think, like anybody in this space, although this is a massive challenge for our business, the first thing we think about is our ethical obligation to make sure that everybody is safe. 

So I’m going to rely on others who can answer the question “When is it safe?” in a more informed way. I do think our geography probably helps, if it is safe to gather in some areas, that’s great, as we are active in many cities around the world. We made the decision to shut down shows across all locations when we did because we felt it was the safest approach. 

So that’s the north star for me, making sure we have 100 percent confidence that when we go back to doing shows, we are totally confident from a public health standpoint, for the safety of the artists, staff and guests in that room, that its 100 percent safe. And it’s still impossible right now to predict when that’s going to be and where. 

Right. So, for example, with a lot of the digital content we’re doing right now, we have more resources we can be focusing on that side of things and really advance what we’re doing in that space. We can invest more time and resources there. 

We can be thinking through safety protocols, what other adjustments we are going to have to make, we can do a lot of that thinking beforehand and plan for whenever things do return. There are handful of different scenarios we can envision and we can be as prepared as we can for those, but we aren’t talking about targeting dates because it would be premature and, I think, it would set the wrong expectations. 

What’s been good for the team has been having a tangible impact for our artists right now. That’s what motivates all of us, it feels good when you are able to make some moves having an impact. On the planning side, we can plan in the abstract for what it looks like when are able to do shows in a city, maybe there will be adjustments as to how we do them. But we aren’t thinking in terms of the calendar right now, because I think it’s just premature. 

So Sofar started in London 10 years ago and grew on a total grassroots basis, from three friends and grew city to city. Even today, across the 400+ cities we do shows, more than 300 are pay-what-you-want. They are “pass-the-hat” shows. The platform we have built for booking and ticketing is made freely available for those people who are organizing shows. The hat that gets passed, that money stays with the artists who did the show, and Sofar doesn’t make any money on that show. And that’s how all shows were for about seven years. 

So a little more than 3 years ago Sofar started experimenting with selling tickets, first in London and then New York, and now today we are selling tickets in a bit less than 100 markets. So it started, as many house shows start, as this organic thing. 

When I joined and when we raised money, one of the areas we were focused on was really scaling up the operations to treat the artist like a customer: do a better job helping artists sell merch, improve the sound and light experience during the show, and that’s part of why we raised money, to roll out Sofar Crew – paid event staff at every ticketed show. And that was completed before all of this happened. The issue that came up with the DOL was (about things that happened) prior to that, in this evolution from “pass the hat” with a handful of people to really selling tickets. I think being transparent with the DOL, explaining where we were at and the fact that we had already rolled out Sofar crew, we were able to reach a resolution with that. And going forward Sofar Crew is rolled out everywhere we do ticketed shows.

Artists that are working and playing in small venues – local, independent artists – are so critically important to all of us, wherever you live, in any city throughout the world. And despite being a large class of critically important creative workers, they are not typically covered  in traditional music industry press. But they are so critical and they are so impacted now, because live events represent basically 100 percent of how they make their living. 

This is just such a crucial time for those kinds of musicians, and I don’t think that’s a controversial position, but it’s something that’s not often discussed.