Tag: Listening Party

Live, online events are now part of the fabric of the music industry, and that looks set to continue even when physical concerts return at scale.

At Music Ally’s Sandbox Summit Global online conference yesterday, several sessions explored how these events are being marketed, starting with a pair of presentations on premieres and listening parties. First up was Lee Martin, founder of startup Listening Party.

“I talk to my clients a lot about controlling their marketing and the messaging around valuable moments, because we know these moments don’t come around very often, so we like to have a strategy around them,” he said.

Album and single premieres are among those moments. Martin categorised the listening parties that can be held around them in three buckets. First: self-hosted, where an artist or label hosts their own music or uses a platform like YouTube to have fans play the music and chat about it. Second: distributed, which is where they use the APIs of a streaming service like Spotify to create a group listening experience. And third, the “punk-rock solution” epitomised by Tim Burgess’s Twitter listening parties. “He simply tells fans to press play at the same moment. What could be more punk than that?!” said Martin.