Online concerts and theatre in 2020, and what’s next for Greengage
Since April 2020, Greengage Ventures has been releasing high quality, original music and theatre performances made to be experienced digitally by audiences all over the world.
It all started as an experiment.
At the start of lockdown in March 2020, I watched a lot of quite boring and unengaging archival recordings of plays and livestreams of concerts and gigs. I also didn’t understand why everyone was giving away these recordings for free while many artists could barely scrape a living.
In response to this, I convinced a friend to join me in making a live performance online of theatre, spoken word and music. In April, Two Metres Apart was born. Tickets were ‘pay what you like’ on Eventbrite and we donated 20% to charity. Greengage paid the artists because I believe it was only fair. We wrote an ambitious description for the show: “We want artists to flourish during COVID-19 social distancing, not just survive it.” To my surprise, the show made a profit.
Just 8 months later, Greengage has grown into a thriving business which has:
- a growing library of original performances made for digital and mostly recorded in HD or 4K (a mix of music, theatre and spoken word). 10 were released in 2020; 3 more coming in January 2021
- grown revenues to over £15K with over 1,200 tickets sold
- paid 51 artists for their work on Greengage online shows
- donated £2,098 to charity (Campaign To End Loneliness and Royal Society of Musicians)
- found audiences in 49 countries
- received several 4* and 5* reviews
- a positive and energetic community of artists, performers, video production people and audience members spanning the globe
And we’re just getting started! So… now what?
Spoiler alert: I never set out to make a production company.
Throughout 2020, I’ve sent out a weekly newsletter that rounds up my favourite online shows (non-Greengage ones) from any genre and anywhere in the world.
Online performances are rapidly becoming more innovative, thrilling and ‘native’ to their digital format. At the forefront are gaming-style virtual reality performance experiences — which, surely, is the future.
And yet, there is no online ‘home’ or curated collection of performances. Content is scattered across the internet and your best hope is a round-up created by a journalist (or me, I guess). Zoom shows are still grainy with poor sound quality.
Most artists can’t monetise their performances effectively, even if they have sizeable fan bases. The major streaming platforms still pay abysmally low rates to artists who aren’t in the top 1% (i.e. anyone who isn’t Taylor Swift or Ed Sheeran). Even Patreon doesn’t fare well by this metric.
So at Greengage, 2021 is about expanding on what we’ve done so far. We will stay true to our 3 main aims: making paid work for artists online, high quality digital shows, and bringing people together from all over the world.
We’ll be focusing much more on our platform, and building our community of viewers and artists. I can’t wait to share the details with you.
Happy New Year! Here’s to optimism and continuing to support artists in 2021.
