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This week I passed a milestone with my 10th live stream and so I thought I’d share the top five things I’ve learned.  I’m also going to talk about a new business that can help musicians get cash now based on projected music streams of their back catalog.  

You’ll Learn

My top five lessons:

1. Live streaming helps you stay motivated
2. Live streaming is good practice
3. Live streaming can build your network
4. Multistream to find your audience
5. Re-purpose your content

Resources

• Restream.io – affiliate link; helps support the podcast at no cost to you
• Episodes that are related or were mentioned:
  • PLP 003: Creating Your Own Music Scene with Loren Hardy and BassNight Orlando
  • PLP 017: Making the Most of Your Music Through Multipurpose Production
  • PLP 020: How I Set Up My DJ Livesteam
  • PLP 021: Reviewing My First Livestream
  • PLP 027: Five Principles for Ethical Live Streaming
• For a complete list of my favorite tools and platforms, see my Resources page
• Ari’s Take – How To Get a Record Advance Without a Record Deal
  • The Music Fund
• Producer Life Podcast – private Facebook group. Join the conversation!

UPDATE: one more thing I’ve learned. Wait until content-ID has identified all the tracks you played before publishing your live stream recording on YouTube. This episode I was impatient, so I shared the link the day after the live stream… and then YouTube blocked the video resulting in a broken link to my fans. Trim wasn’t working, so I had to re-edit the local recording and re-post it.

The complete and cleaned-up audio.

Transcript

What’s up Heroes, welcome to episode 32 of the Producer life Podcast.  This week I passed a milestone with my 10th live stream and so I thought I’d share the top five things I’ve learned.  I’m also going to talk about a new business that can help musicians get cash now based on projected music streams of their back catalog.  

But first, cue the intro music

I’ve really enjoyed live streaming over the last two and a half months. I wasn’t sure I would.  I guess I’ve got the pandemic to thank for that… it isn’t something I’d probably have tried otherwise because this was supposed to be my year to really start playing out in-person.

I’ve talked about my live stream setup back in episode 20 and 21 if you want to know more about what I’m doing, I’ll have links in the show notes. So here are the top five things I’ve learned.

1. First, weekly live streaming is a great motivator to force me to stick to a regular schedule of finding new music, preparing tracks, and planning sets. There was a story I heard years ago about two little boys who wanted to get over a 10 foot stone wall to get to an apple tree.  As they talked back and forth about ways to accomplish the task, one of them suddenly grabbed the other’s hat and threw it over the wall, then told the other, “I guess we’re committed now.”  Scheduling and advertising a livestream each week is like throwing your hat over the wall. It forces a commitment. I’ve been posting my livestream schedule four weeks out on Bandsintown and then embedding that schedule on my website and Facebook page.

2. Weekly live live streaming seems to be a pretty good substitute for live-DJing. My setup is nearly identical to a live performance and I’m doing most of the same functions from mixing on my APC 40 to controlling graphics. I even find myself getting nervous like I would before a live audience. Live streaming also gives you the opportunity to interact with fans directly in ways you couldn’t during a live set.  The only things I’m NOT doing, and this is a big one, is reading a crowd. There isn’t really a substitute for this unfortunately. 

3. Third point: use live streaming as a networking opportunity. I see a lot of DJs, labels, and promoters holding virtual festivals and bringing together multiple DJs or even just friends to stream together.  That’s done in a variety of ways; I’ve seen local friends share turntables and I’ve also seen very professional live streams that switch from one DJ’s stream to the next with each DJ apparently streaming from their own location and then I’ve seen live streams that were largely pre-recorded with the DJs submitting mixes and a VJ providing visual effects over the top.  

A livestream I watched this past weekend was a combination of several of these. The first set began with a DJ performing live while later sets were pre-recorded with the DJs interacting in the chat box.   I’m trying something a little different. Rather than networking with other DJs, I’ve been reaching out to dancers and flow artists and having them submit short clips which I sync to my music using Resolume. My hope is that over time, this will provide a unique, collaborative show that will build an enthusiastic following.  It seems to be working so far; I’m averaging about 100 people watching each week across various platforms in addition to 40-50 streams on YouTube after the fact.   Engagement isn’t great which is a little concerning… and I’m not sure why.

4. Use Restream.io or some other service to stream to multiple locations to help you find your fans. Restream.io is free to use with some premium features you can pay for. I am an affiliate and I’ll have my link in the show notes… so if you use my link it helps support this podcast without costing you anything extra. That said, I’m also a customer and love the service.  It allows you to send your live stream to them and then they rebroadcast it to multiple locations.

I keep adding locations to see where my audience is hiding out, and I’ve been a little surprised. Currently I have the most listeners by far on my personal Facebook page where I’m getting 50-80 people listening each week. Behind that is … Periscope with 10-20 tuning in, then only a handful on Twitch, Dlive, YouTube, and Mixcloud.

Based on what I’ve read, I had expected Twitch to be much bigger but I guess it has to do with my existing follower base on other platforms and how the algorithms favor content on their own platforms. In other words, I already had several thousand personal Friends on Facebook and several thousand followers on Twitter (who owns Periscope) so that fact that I’m streaming to THEIR platforms means they’re probably showing my stream to more people.   I want to like Mixcloud’s live streaming, which is still in beta…. But it’s missing a lot right now. It doesn’t integrate with Restream.io’s cross platform chat, the metrics are difficult to find after a stream, and you have to generate a new stream-key for each stream which is just annoying. No other streaming platform I’m using requires that, and it’s one more thing to remember before going live.  I’m currently on a 90-day free trial, and at this point I’m on the fence as to weather or not I want to continue live streaming there.  Either way, I’ll continue to use them for my audio mixes since it’s the only place you can legally post a mix of predominantly other people’s music.ONE

5. Re-purpose content.  I’ve talked about this concept back in the episode 17 on “multipurpose production.” With my live stream I’ve worked out a pretty efficient workflow to generate regular content for my fans. My lives tream is every Wednesday at 9pm eastern. On Thursday I load the recording from Streamlabs OBS into Hitfilm (after converting from MKV to MP4 using the free Handbrake software). Hitfilm is free video editing and compositing software. I also have Adobe Premier and Adobe After Effects, but Hitfilm loads a preview much faster and has an easier mechanism for exporting screen captures.  

I watch the performance focusing on the visual aspects. Do the graphics match the songs? Am I accidentally layering my logo over my dancers and flow artists? How do my movements look? How do I sound when I’m talking?  I think that sort of review is critical to improving my performance. As I’m going through, I’ll export 5-10 screenshots for social media the next week. I’ll also export at least one short video clip.  

On Thursdays I also add metadata and descriptions to my YouTube recording and share that out on social media.

On Friday I dig into Ableton where I also recorded the set’s audio.  Here’s where I focus on the audio mixing.  Did I fade when I meant to? How does it sound? Did I cut the bass at the right times? Are the volume levels right? I also use Ableton to fix any major errors in my mixing, remove my talking, and add a few DJ tags (things like “you’re listening to the House Ninja”)   I then upload that cleaned-up mix to Mixcloud and use one of Thursday’s screen-captures as the background for the cover-art which I also made using a text overlay in HitFilm the day prior.  Finally, on Friday I share that audio mix on social media.  Honestly, I’m not getting many plays on Mixcloud yet… but I think that will come. Posting to Mixcloud and YouTube are also important for reasons I explain in Episode 27. 

So, those were my five big lessons: live streaming helps you stay motivated and on schedule, it’s great practice as a DJ, use your lives stream to build your network, use a multi-streaming service like Restream.io, and re-purpose your content. I’d love to know what you’ve learned through either your own live streams or watching others, you can join the conversation at ProducerLifePodcast.com or over on the private Facebook group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/ProducerLifePodcast

I was listening to another outstanding podcast for musicians, The New Music Business Podcast by Ari Herstand recently and he was interviewing the CEO of a relatively new startup called The Music Fund. They have a unique business model that may help some of you.  Traditional big music labels help musicians by providing much-needed up front cash which you can then re-invest in your next album, video, or just living expenses.  The problem is that you frequently lose ownership of your music. 

Here’s where The Music Fund comes in.  Whereas record labels look at future potential for the next big star, The Music Fund looks at the data for your past performance on streaming platforms and then gives you an up front cash advance on future payments from your back catalog. In other words, they don’t look at future releases, they pay you on what you’ve already released that are performing well.  You get paid now, AND you retain full ownership of your music.  The process is data driven and fully automated, so all you have to do is go to their site and plug in some information to see what you think; you can find them at   https://themusic.fund/  According to their website, this will cost quote, “ as little as 1% of your royalties.” Make sure you also check out Ari’s interview; I’ll have a link in the show notes at Producer Life Podcast.com 

Thanks for listening.  I would love to feature some of your reviews on this podcast, so if you’ve got three minutes please go over Apple Podcasts and leave a rating and a review.  Each week I’ll select one and feature it in the podcast… and it will really help the podcast grow. Thanks so much,

Until next week, this is the House Ninja reminding you to be someone’s Hero today.