Recently, Live to Your Living Room was granted funding by Arts Council England to help support the work that we do. Getting this recognition means the world to our small business, but what does it mean for Live to Your Living Room going forward? We caught up with our founders, Cat McGill and Pete Ord, to find out.
This is exciting news! So, first things first, what is the funding for?
Really exciting! So, it’s all aimed at continuing the work we’ve been doing on hybrid gigs – in other words, gigs that have an audience in the room, as well as online. We started running hybrids in partnership with Folk Arts Oxford back in 2021, thanks to some funding they received from the Arts Council. Now, we’ve been granted some funding in our own right to pull together everything we’ve learned and create a resource that we can share with other venues and promoters.
Why did you choose to focus on hybrid gigs?
Hybrid gigs have become increasingly important for us in recent years, as they allow us to reach a broader range of artists and open up more cultural experiences for audiences who can’t get to gigs in person. We know that many other promoters and venues have tried to run hybrid gigs since lockdowns ended, with mixed success. We hope that by sharing our approach to hybrid gigs, we can give a fresh perspective to the arts sector and encourage more venues to try them out.
So, what is Live to Your Living Room’s approach to hybrid gigs?
At Live to Your Living Room, we feel very strongly that livestreaming gigs isn’t just about putting up a camera in the corner of the room. We’ve always been very conscious of the experience that our audience members have at our events, and we’ve curated this carefully – over the years this has included things like having background music and a host welcoming the audience as they arrive, Q&As and behind the scenes chats with the artists, and even raffles during the interval (these are folk gigs, after all!). More recently, we’ve also created a WhatsApp community for people who want to chat throughout the gig. We want to capture the essence of ‘being at a gig’ and recreate that for the online audience – the connection, and the sense of having a shared experience together.
In our most recent focus groups, many people told us that watching online gigs is sometimes like being a fly on the wall, watching everyone else have fun but not actually being included. Part of the work we do at LTYLR is raising awareness of the importance of online gigs as an access issue, and trying to encourage a mindset shift where online gigs are seen as an equal part of the live music eco-system. The idea is not to replace gigs in venues, but to offer alternatives for when those aren’t an option – and as such, promoters should be giving as much thought to the experience of the online audience as the in-person one.
How will this project impact artists and audiences?
This project isn’t aimed specifically at impacting our own artists and audiences – rather, it’s about propagating a shift in mindset for the arts sector as a whole. We hope that the resource we create through this project will help venues and promoters to understand the importance of online events, and give them some pointers for offering online options for their own audiences.
Our long-term vision is that online gigs will be seen as normal, and just another option in the way that audiences consume live music. By sharing what we’ve learned about hybrid gigs, hopefully we can encourage more promoters to consider doing them, allowing more artists to perform to more people – and in particular, people who face barriers to accessing gigs in person.
Where has the money come from?
We’ve received this funding through the Arts Council’s ‘Supporting Grassroots Music’ programme, which is a strand within the National Lottery Project Grants funded by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. You can find out more about the funding here.
What are the main outcomes you’re hoping to see from the project?
The main goal is to create a free resource detailing the processes and protocols behind our approach to hybrid gigs. This will be available to download from our website, and will be officially ‘launched’ with an open-access webinar later next year. We really hope that this will be a springboard for opening up conversations about access in live events, and in particular how we can curate meaningful, inclusive online experiences for audiences who can’t access physical venues easily. This is a segment of the population who are often excluded, even from conversations about access (and Cat is making it her personal mission to do a TED talk on this subject, so watch this space!)
How will the project help Live to Your Living Room to progress as an organisation and develop in the future?
We’ve been on an interesting journey as an organisation – as many people will know, we started up in response to the loss of live music events in lockdown 2020, and it wasn’t always clear what sort of call there would be for these events once the world opened up again. We’ve done four years of gigs now – around 250 events at the time of writing – and we’ve got a pretty solid handle on how we want our gigs to go, and what we’re trying to achieve with them. With this project we are starting to look outwards, to share what we’ve learned over the last few years, and advocate for access and inclusion for people who face barriers to attending events in person.
We want to support other promoters to develop their own online events, to encourage a mindset shift around livestreaming, and for mainstream venues and promoters to recognise the importance of curating inclusive online events. Our mission is equity of access to the performing arts – a world where everyone can access live events in a way that works for them – and we hope this is the first step along the way to making that a reality!
We’ll keep you looped in as the project progresses! In the meantime, to find out more about Arts Council England and their support for grassroots music, head to their website.