Artists have been scrambling to launch their own livestreams on Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Twitch and other services amid the Covid-19 lockdown. So take a bow, Erykah Badu, for taking things to the next level and launching her own livestreaming platform.
Forbes has a good profile of the what, how and why of the tech behind Badu’s Quarantine Concert Series: Apocalypse, Live from Badubotron series, hosted on a site alongside her own line of merchandise. Badu is also charging for her livestreams: $1 for the first concert in March, then $2 for the following one, and $3 for the event coming up later in April.
(Update: Badu used the Maestro livestreaming platform to build her service.)
“This is an experiment. There’s nobody in between me and that dollar,” she said. “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… Here we are, proof of concept. It can be done and it can be done by an artist, who can erase the invisible lines between myself and fans, or in this case, the user. 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…”
Image by I_#39_m friday / Shutterstock.com
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