REPORTING FROM ORLANDO — Jazz at Lincoln Center has been live streaming its concerts for a little over three years and anecdotal evidence shows it’s helping grow the audience for jazz by giving it away. And that’s without hurting the box office, said Aaron Bisman, director of Audience Development, Jazz at Lincoln Center, a Tessitura client who told his story during the annual Tessitura Learning and Community Conference here.
This past year, they broadcast just under 300 performances from two theater spaces — Rose Theater and The Appel Room — and from Dizzy’s Club Coca Cola. “A webcast is like a seating,” Bisman said. “Every set or seating we count as a distinct webcast. Every single season concert that an artist gives us permission to webcast we webcast. In the club it is more selective, because of costs, so we do two to five nights a week.”
The goal is to live stream everything on the main stage. Three years ago, live streaming was unknown, so it took some convincing artists. “At this point they are asking us if we’ll webcast,” Bisman said.
For club shows, it’s usually accomplished with a single camera, but there is still a studio audio feed. On the main stage, it’s a five-plus camera shoot as well as studio mix, so there is a lot of staff involved — one to four total. There is also a significant investment in cameras and equipment. In three years, Jazz at Lincoln Center has already upgraded that equipment once.
There is no empirical evidence that the webcasts, available at livestream.com/jazz, are helping attendance, but there is anecdotal evidence. Managing and Artistic Director Wynton Marsalis said the orchestra was on tour in South America and some kids came up asking questions about specific solos. “Kids are listening so intently they can ask detailed questions. That rich, deep connection you hear in a story like that, as a nonprofit that’s very powerful. Those anecdotes add up,” Bisman said.
Last year 265,000 unique individuals watched live concert webcasts from Jazz at Lincoln Center. The year before, July-June, it was 230,000. In 2015, they hosted 90,000 ticketed visitors in the club and 70,000 for main stage shows.
Jazz at Lincoln Center is a nonprofit dedicated to expanding a global community for jazz. The webcasts are not a marketing effort to sell tickets; they are an effort to spread and share live jazz. “We encourage people to get together and watch these webcasts and we help organize that. We call it our Micro Concert effort. We find jazz lovers and give them promotional resources and support to organize free viewing parties,” Bisman said. There are currently 90 concert network hosts.
Besides webcasting, Jazz at Lincoln Center has made a major investment in digital overall in the past couple of years. Greg Scholl, executive director, gave the organization a sharper and renewed focus to educate audiences of all ages about jazz and build this global community. “To do that we needed to be more than just a venue in New York and just educators in one place. We had toured for decades but now, this investment in content, in storytelling, in connection points through digital channels has been something very new,” Bisman said.
The video is imbeddable as well, branded with the Jazz at Lincoln Center logo. Marsalis maintains his own website as an artist and he imbeds the video on his website. Lots of viewers are in New York and the majority are in the U.S., but the webcast is viewed in over 100 countries, territories and provinces, Bisman said. And from whatever time zone, people are watching live, so some of those viewing parties are at very odd hours.
Jazz at Lincoln Center also just launched a record company, Blue Engine Records, which will feature archival recordings over 20-plus years along with some new studio recordings. Those concerts brought back to life will give fans a sense of the vision behind Lincoln Center’s concert seasons.
“We think there’s a through-line through all these pieces. Understanding an audiences’ journey is like a web. It’s not that first you like us on Facebook and then you watch a webcast and then you come to a show. It might happen in any order and we hope that donations are in there and we want things to keep happening,” Bisman said.
Jazz at Lincoln Center benefitted in this outreach from the fact SiriusXM opened a recording studio in the venue 10 years ago. They are a season sponsor and broadcast many of the concerts live on their Real Jazz station.
Live streaming is expensive, Bisman admitted, and you can’t quantify an ROI. Besides cost, it’s very new, may involve seat kills, requires a control room to air the show so you need space, requires permission from the performers so it’s one more ask to make, and is more work. It’s also risky — what if no one watches?
It’s also necessary that management believes and Scholl understands. His edict to the staff was twofold:
1. Not everyone who wants to be at your events or concerts can be. Sometimes it’s money, sometimes they’re across the world. Not making this content available to them is denying them an experience to engage with your heart.
2. Engagement with live/streaming video is much higher than with video on demand. We also create original video content and put up songs on Youtube, but engagement with video on demand is less.
This was his vision.
In the nonprofit arts space, live streaming is pretty new, but in actuality, organizations are just catching up to where audiences have already been, Bisman said.
Interviewed for this story: Aaron Bisman, (212) 258-9800