Digital Works Podcast
Talking about all the different things that 'digital' means in the arts, culture and heritage sectors. Tales of success and failure, interrogating the shiny new things and looking at what works (or not) and why, Interviews with digital folks working across the sector and beyond, in-house, consultants, funders, and more.
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Digital Works Podcast
Episode 054 - Ross Eustis (SFJAZZ) on growing digital programmes from scratch, finding new audiences, learning from other cultural organisations, and the role of digital in enhancing the in-person experience
A conversation with SFJAZZ's Director of Digital, Ross Eustis.
Since 2020 SFJAZZ have developed a comprehensive programme of content for their digital audiences. We look at how these programmes can expand audience reach and enhance engagement.
Ross talks about how this digital work can complement in-person experiences, making performances more accessible and help foster a sense of community globally.
Ross also emphasises the importance of a beginner's mindset, transparency with audiences, and the value of knowledge-sharing between cultural institutions.
If you want to check out all of the videos Ross and his team have been making, head over to SFJAZZ.org/AtHome
Hello and welcome to the Digital Works podcast, a podcast about digital stuff in the cultural sector. My name's Ash and in today's episode episode 54, I talk to SFJazz's Director of Digital, ross Eustace. We talk about the experiments with streaming that SFJazz focused on through the pandemic to great success, and how they've refined and evolved that work over the last couple of years. Ross talks about the importance of taking a beginner's mindset, being honest with your audiences about what's happening, the value of digital in reaching and engaging audiences you'd never otherwise have a relationship with. The importance of sharing knowledge between cultural institutions, and lots more. Enjoy, hi Ross.
Speaker 1:Thanks for joining me for a chat today. Of course, ash, great to be here. Thanks for inviting me. I said this when we were speaking a couple of weeks ago, but a number of people over the last few years have pointed me in the direction of the digital work that SFJazz has been doing since 2020. And so I'm really looking forward to our conversation today. You are the director of digital at SFJAZZ. Could you maybe tell us a bit about what your role encompasses, what SFJAZZ is and does, and maybe a bit about your sort of personal career journey to where you are today?
Speaker 2:Definitely I'll start with SFJAZZ. It's an organization that's been around for 40 years, I think. For whatever reason, there were a lot of these nonprofit organizations that popped up in the 80s. So we just celebrated our 40th anniversary this past year and in 2013,. That was sort of like a huge pivotal moment for SF Jazz. Up until that point, we'd been what we call a nomadic presenter, so we're presenting in different halls around the city. It started as a festival kind of grew into a year-round presenter and in 2013, we opened up the SF Jazz Center and so this is in the same sort of cultural corridor as the symphony and the opera and the ballet, so all these arts organizations that have been in San Francisco for many more years.
Speaker 2:It's a devoted building specifically to present jazz in San Francisco. It's a beautiful building. There's two performance spaces in it. Main Hall fits about 700 people, the smaller room fits about 100. We do a lot of education events there, all kinds of things, and I call that out because the founder of SF Jazz was just like a total force Randall Klein.
Speaker 2:He was the one that really willed this building to be. He also had the foresight and the vision to invest in the creation of the building in a video system, and so this is a combination of cameras placed strategically around the hall. They're kind of hidden. The audience would never know they were there and they can be robotically controlled from up in a video suite. And this video suite has, you know, multiple monitors. It has a controller and a switcher and all these. Now, the whole idea was that there could be one person, one director, one engineer that could sit in the chair and cut live, edit a show and do it really efficiently. And you know, it wasn't a perfect, you know, approach to that by any means, but it was also very human. It was like how would an audience member react and follow the show, follow what was happening, follow their ears, follow visually what was happening on stage, and so that was sort of the approach from early on, and we started filming shows in 2014. And we present shows pretty much every weekend. Hundreds of shows a year. These are some of the biggest names in jazz and you know, for a lot of people they might not know these names, but for the people in the jazz world, you know when you say folks like you know Wynton Marsalis and Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter, and you know even some younger, more rising artists, like you know, hiromi from Japan. You know these are big, big names. So it's sort of like an ongoing, like every weekend there's something new. We curate in a very intentional way and kind of bring together different programs and artists and we empower artists to do a lot of premieres at SF Jazz. So it's a really cool artistic program and the objective was, you know, to capture it. You know, we started filming shows, you know, in 2014, and didn't quite know what we were going to do with them yet. And as we reached 2019, 2020, we started ramping up our efforts.
Speaker 2:And I had been at the organization. I actually came in and started in the marketing department and so I got into content marketing. No one was really making videos or interviewing artists. I was like, hey, I could do that, taught myself how to do that. You know some of my early work is definitely, you know, rough around the edges. But you know they gave me a shot and started improving the production quality and in 20, I think, 18, 19, they were hiring the first position for a digital program and at the time it was going to be incubated in the artistic department. And so I went for the job and I got it and I started working directly with Randall, the founder, and we'd worked with consultants just on looking at business models. I'm not sure how much people would be familiar with Digital Concert Hall, which is the Berlin Philz digital program. That was a huge inspiration. I remember that the founder came and met with our board and came to San Francisco and we hosted them and I've had many conversations with them since with him and Randall, and there's been many other organizations we've looked towards. Some of them have been on your podcast.
Speaker 2:So those were the stages of sort of research and development. What could be a business model? How would we price this? Is our product even good enough to monetize? Would people value it? Is our product even good enough to monetize? Would people value it? And we didn't know the answers to some of these questions and that sort of leads to the pandemic. I think I'll leave it there for now, but I'm sure we'll talk about the pandemic and how that was an accelerator.
Speaker 2:So that's what I do. I manage and run the digital program. We're a team of just four. One of them's a half position. Who's our archivist? And we really work with a lot of departments within the organization for certain needs like marketing or fundraising or audio production. Those people technically live and work in the production department but they serve the digital department because we're capturing audio video of shows now. So it's a small and mighty department but it's really. It takes the whole organization, I think, to accomplish something like this. And yeah, I'll get into more detail about all that a little bit later, you know your career in some ways mirrors mine.
Speaker 1:When I worked in-house, you know, you came into a position that was nominally in the marketing department and then, just because you were interested or had some skills, you sort of picked up things as they needed to be done and that then ended up in digital roles, more senior roles, I think for all these new things like it's it's.
Speaker 2:You don't go to school for this stuff. You know there's not like a degree or a cut path that you could just, oh, I'll just replicate that and that's how you get there. It's something like digital and it's different for every organization too. But, honestly, one I guess case study or example I had in my mind I grew up in Seattle, washington, which is up in the Pacific Northwest. There's a radio station up there called KEXP, up in the Pacific Northwest. There's a radio station up there called KEXP and they're just sort of a public, I think an NPR affiliate national public, our BBC or America's BBC basically.
Speaker 2:And there was a guy that came in early on when YouTube started and just said, hey, I think we should capture YouTube videos of artists in studio at KEXP and I'll do it kind of on a bare bones budget and you know we'll just try it out. And you know, now they're kind of they have a channel that's up there with NPR's Tiny Desk and it's become like one of the stops. If you're going to do it in studio, you know video recording like that's the place to do it, and so just, you know, it just takes, I think, somebody that convinced the right people and giving it a shot, and fortunately I didn't have to do too much convincing at SFJAZZ. But I kind of found myself in a position where I was like, okay, no one's really doing this, we're talking about it but no one's actually doing the work. I want to do the work and I just sort of volunteered myself, added the other duties assigned in my job position really leaned into that and that's where my interests really were.
Speaker 1:So I just always made time for it, in addition to all the other stuff I had to do. And you said, you know, the shift into this new digital role sort of happened as the pandemic arrived, you know, and as 2020 hit and all of the disruption was unleashed. That was was unleashed at the time. It sounds like maybe sf jazz was sort of fortuitously, in a quite a good position to be able to respond to that, perhaps a better position than many other organizations who, you know, had no infrastructure, hadn't been doing something for the last 10 years. Yeah, a.
Speaker 2:A lot of the groundwork and research and everything had been completed, though it's still. You have to take that and distill it and make a decision on what you're actually going to do, and there were definitely a lot of different opinions. There was definitely a large number of people in the organization that felt like, you know, we should just give this away, let's just put it up on YouTube. There were people that didn't really believe we could monetize it or that people would actually pay for this, given there's so much video content and jazz content up on YouTube anyways, and so I think framing it as an experiment was a helpful way to just get people to try something. And at the time again, it's like shelter in place happened in March 2020. And we were all sort of pivoting and starting to work remotely from home for the first time, and at that time you know, if we all remember back, it seems crazy now, but we all thought this was going to last like a month. We were like, okay, this will be a month experiment, we'll do four live streams, one a week, and we'll see what the response is to this. And it was kind of incredible too, cause, like I remember that the Friday before a shelter in place. This is the last day we're all in the office together. I was asked to call a meeting with just all the key people who might be involved in trying to get this thing off the ground. And we got in this room and basically the goal was we're going to be at home next week. Our shows are canceled next week. What is something simple that we feel like we can get out the door and launch in one week? So let's target next Friday as the first live stream first, whatever we're going to do, that'll be the date. And it was kind of incredible. We were just like in one week we're going to launch this thing that we've been talking about doing for years. We were just like in one week we're going to launch this thing that we've been talking about doing for years. And we thought in our own sort of mind and without the pandemic, would probably be launched in like a year, year and a half later. And that week was crazy.
Speaker 2:We're all adjusting to video calls for the first time and we're trying to figure out how we can make our website accommodate this offering. And there was sort of a couple of simple ingredients. One was we weren't sure about music, licensing and stuff, just the ins and outs and how. That related to live streams and video on demand. And we have a house ensemble called the SF Jazz Collective. They're just like this amazing band, rotating cast of just like the best band leaders, composers, instrumentalists in the jazz world. We've had some vocalists too, because we commission their music, they write originals for us, we control that music. So we're like, okay, that feels safe, we can have our own band, a recording of them playing their own music, and we'll try to make the video and audio, polish it up, make it look as good as possible. And it was just a total sprint to make that happen, because you're file transferring it's taking forever. Everyone's internet is super slow.
Speaker 2:And then the other piece of this was let's try to monetize it. There was some intel we had actually from a board member who's the founder of Patreon, which has this sort of model that everyone's sort of replicating now. But the idea is that you support an artist or a creator or organization on a monthly or annual basis subscription model, but it's done in much more of a philanthropic way. I was able to talk to him and what he told us was across the board, across everybody that uses Patreon, that he didn't really see any price resistance between $1 and $5. So it's like this very low amount of money to try something out and support and get access to something. Whether you price it at 50 cents or 350 or $5, there's not really any difference to a lot of people's minds. So it was like the price point to us was we made it $5 and it was sort of we could talk to people about it in very casual terms. You know, it's like buying a cup of coffee and you're supporting these artists now and you're supporting SF Jazz when you know our venue shuttered.
Speaker 2:And so the other piece of this was figuring out how to technically do that on the website. So we were able to basically set up a page where you have to sign up and log in in order to reveal the video player, and then we gave it a whirl, we tried it. I feel like it was a nail biter. Every step of the way. We sent an email out just to our patrons, our ticket buyers, our members. We already have a membership program.
Speaker 2:I think SFJAZZ is unique in some ways, and a lot of performing arts organizations have what's called a subscription program, where you buy a package of shows and SFJAZZ is more.
Speaker 2:You become a member, you donate annually and then you get all these perks and benefits and early access to tickets and things like that. So it was easy for us to just say hey, you're already a member of us, you already support us, we'll just give you access to this. But if you don't, if you aren't a member, we created a new membership level just for digital access. So I think that first one we had like a couple hundred people sign up which again, like we'd never seen like that kind of growth for our membership program in years. In the ensuing weeks it just it increased every week and when we started attracting people that were sort of outside our immediate orbit and and the rest, as they say, it's kind of history, but like it really truly was this experiment. And then it kind of just exploded and then it was all we could do to just keep up with it and keep it going and in that first year 15,000 new people signed up for membership. And again, this is, these numbers are just like crazy.
Speaker 1:Like for our own membership program, we never seen growth like that before and you've mentioned a number of things there that I'd love to dig into but I think maybe the most important from my perspective, and certainly it feels like the most transferable to other organizations, is this sort of spirit of experimentation that feels like really infused everything that you did. Could you talk a bit about that, because it's often something that it seems cultural organisations struggle with. They want to put out, understandably, a very polished product whenever they're meeting their audiences and, as you've just outlined, everything you were doing around. This was you were doing it for the first time, you were doing it at speed, you were doing it in this sort of stressful societal situation as well.
Speaker 2:Perfection was probably not a realistic benchmark to reach for yeah, and I would say, I mean, you're 100 right and I would say sf jazz generally is the organization like when we put stuff out, we want to be, you know, impeccable, perfect, just perfect. It's a standard we hold ourselves to, both in the experience people have in our hall and also just the marketing materials, the brochures, everything. And I feel like as tough as the pandemic was at so many levels and all the dimensions of that, it kind of gave permission to try something and not worry about it being perfect. And I feel like the tone, like the candor of you know, putting something out there and not putting out. I was like, hey, like this is the ultimate product, you know, and and like buy it because, like you know, try this and get in on it. It was just, hey, like we're trying something here, it's not perfect, have a little grace, we'll have grace with you know, and just let's see if we can make something work.
Speaker 2:And also what we were doing early on was proactively asking for feedback. There was a live chat every week which was kind of this amazing space, gathering space for the community, and you know the artists would be in the chat, our staff members would be in the chat, you know, people would be helping each other with technical issues, like, hey, I can't hear the audio. It's like not us, but like another member tuning in would be like, oh, you should try doing this. You know, it was like this great, like everybody helping each other out, and our box office team would suddenly became like technical support teams and, you know, got really good at answering all these technical questions that people had.
Speaker 2:But a lot of it was just, you know, like listening to our audience and figuring out how to solve problems they were having and just, you know, being very open to their feedback and also just not trying to say that we nailed it yet. We were just, hey, we're trying this out, help us out, making it better. You know, that was something I feel like that persisted for well over a year. We got to a really great place, you know, in a number of months, but kept making improvements. What are ways that we can keep pushing this forward? So I feel like that tone was a really important piece of being able to put out an imperfect thing but then iteratively, you know, and through a lot of feedback loops, making it better and better every week.
Speaker 1:I think it's such an inspiring example of this sort of approach, you know, of artistic leadership being brought in and sort of allowing the organization to move in this direction and you know, you and all your colleagues being able to throw the track down in front of the onrushing train. I think there's so much in there to admire and I'm really interested to hear you know it sounds like you were learning all the time, certainly through that first year. What do you feel the sort of big lessons were that came out of that? You know, were there lessons around sort of formats and timing and pricing and messaging and audience experience? You know, as you stand here in 2024, looking back over the last four years, what feel like the big lessons that you've learned?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean it's a great question. I think first and foremost and this was again some of this was from the research that we had done A weekly scheduled program is really important and over time it starts to advertise itself. So that means, like every time you're trying to do a live stream, if it happens on a different day or a different time, you have to market that and you have to communicate that to your audience. And it's a lot of work to get people to focus on that, make time for that in their schedule. The program we have even the name we gave it was just only thinking about the rhythm and we called it Fridays at Five, and that was just. The name itself tells you what it is Every Friday at five. Now this is 5 pm Pacific time, but that time worked for East Coast viewers as well. It wasn't too late Again, the idea being that the name itself is telling you all you need to know to show up and participate in it. And to this day, it's been four years now we still do live streams every Friday. We're recording this on a Friday, we have a live stream tonight in the center and our normal concert time is, you know, 7 or 7.30 pm. But even that discrepancy the 7 or 7.30 is something that you know has been confusing to our audience.
Speaker 2:But I think that, again, like, the most important piece here is like, because we've been doing this every Friday for four years at pretty much the same time. It's something that you know. We send reminders out, sure, but a lot of people it's just it's in their weekly rhythms, it's something they know is going to happen. They may not be free every Friday, but if they are, they know in the back of their mind, just like people used to. I think it still happens, but when I was a kid growing up, every Sunday night at 8 pm I watched the Simpsons. I knew it was on, I knew there was a new episode and it was my favorite show, so I would make time to turn on the television, watch the Simpsons. This is not the Simpsons we're talking about, but I think shows the power of having something without fail every week. Whether it's a rerun or a brand new episode doesn't matter. That there's always that thing and to me that's the most important driver of the platform and it was something that Digital Concert Hall also has like part of their DNA, that it was advice we took from them and took it very seriously.
Speaker 2:The other format sort of thing that we tested out and really started to emphasize was length of the concert. So the in-person concert we do at SFJAZZ is typically about 90 minutes, and for various reasons, the biggest one being what is the length of content, video content when you sit down in your living room, what is the average length? What's the maximum length and we're not talking about movies here, we're thinking more when you fire up Netflix or HBO, or if you watch a special on a news channel, pbs or whatever and 60 Minutes, that's the name of a show in itself. But that just seemed like the ideal length and what we were doing was editing these concerts down a bit, really tightening them up, but really still keeping the arc of a concert. So we're always keeping the finale and the encore, you know, maybe cutting out some songs in the middle that you know are more sort of filler or not to call it that. But it's like every show has an arc and you can kind of tighten that while still getting sort of the main points of like okay, it's going to ramp up here. This is the fast song. Okay, we're going to come down a little bit here and then we're going to go for a big finish and I'm just really simulating that concert experience, but in a shorter format and you know timing, where we would ask people to donate because we wanted this program to really benefit artists the whole point we were doing it.
Speaker 2:We set up a very simple financial model where you know the donations we got during these live streams would just be split between SF Jazz and the artists 50-50,. You know SF Jazz portion going to just keeping the series going, all the work we were doing behind the scenes and the artists, because it's their concert and they were also all stuck at home. Touring is their primary source of income. Many of them were supposed to play at SF Jazz that spring and it worked and that length, I feel like, left people wanting more. The great trumpeter Miles Davis would always say leave the audience wanting more. And it was something where, at the end of it, everyone was super excited to go check out more music by the artist. People would hang out in the chat and savor this experience that they just had together.
Speaker 1:And in terms of pricing, you spoke about the thinking that you did that led to the sort of initial launch pricing back in 2020. How has the sort of I suppose cost pricing model around this program evolved over the intervening four years?
Speaker 2:I mean to date it actually it honestly hasn't changed too much. I think we acknowledge that we sort of hit a sweet spot in that it was priced low enough that it wasn't really a barrier of entry for anybody. And that's certainly part of SF Jazz's mission is we're trying to improve access to this art form and there's so many ways that you can try to accomplish that in itself. But the reality is our average ticket price and I say this and we sell out like 90% of our shows we're actually in this year that we're in the season is the most tickets we've ever sold. So things are back. People are coming back to shows in a big way At least that's what we're seeing and a lot of these tickets are average ticket price around 50, 60 plus dollars and we totally acknowledge that for a lot of people that is a barrier of entry. Now we do always have the balcony seats and we totally acknowledge that for a lot of people that is a barrier of entry. Now we do always have, like, the balcony seats and we always say there's not a bad seat in the House of Jazz, but our balcony is not way back in the hall like you see in symphonies. It's kind of built up and around the stage and so there's always the lower price tickets and we always try to keep those at a consistent floor. But I think what I'm trying to get to here is that for $5, you can see this concert. That was probably sold out when it happened and the average ticket price, especially if it was a super high profile show, was probably more than $60, which is a barrier for a lot of people and it's a simple physical capacity issue.
Speaker 2:I mentioned earlier that our main hall, which is the hall we normally film out of, I mentioned earlier that our main hall, which is the hall we normally film out of, fits a maximum of 700 people.
Speaker 2:These live streams we were doing had several times that many people, tuning in thousands, and it was a way of really expanding the audience, making more from the donations of the live stream than they got paid for the in-person performance, In some cases artists that would play just one night in our main hall. So it's like 600, 650, 700 tickets that we're selling and their audience for these live streams was 3,000. So I think, both for the artists and for our ability to have an audience and who can watch and how many people can watch it suddenly is unlimited, and that was one of the reasons why we were going for this digital program before the pandemic was because of a capacity issue, Like it's a good problem to have, but how do we actually take what's happening on stage in our hall and make it so a lot more people can experience it than just the physical capacity of the room?
Speaker 1:And I want to sort of talk a bit about how audiences have responded to this work. It sounds like initially it was work that was aimed at sort of your existing audience, your core audience, a way to retain a connection with your members, etc. But it sounds like since then you have reached a lot of new audience. You mentioned 15,000 members after the end of the first year, which is amazing how much of that has continued to persist, I suppose beyond the end of the pandemic, as much as it may be rumbling on a low level. But the return of in-person attendance Are you still seeing the digital program reaching the audiences, reaching large amounts of audiences? Is there a big difference that you're seeing between that audience and your in-person attendance? Or is it people that would? People come in person and they also watch online later when the video goes out?
Speaker 2:yeah, there was definitely a lot of concern about the digital program as we were getting back to doing live shows. There was concern that it would cannibalize the audience a bit, meaning, you know, even when we started doing shows again, covid was still around then. It's still around now. There are people that are. You know, despite this, I think for a lot of us everything feels kind of as busy and normal as ever and people are still getting COVID and you know, for the most part, especially if they've gotten vaccinated, they're sick for like a week or two and then they're back at it. That is to say that you know there's a lot of people that prefer to stay home, that still aren't quite comfortable being in a large crowd, and, anyways, there was concern from a lot of people including artists and managers, agents booking tours for artists that the digital offering would cannibalize what was their primary objective, which was I'm going to be in this market, I want to play at your venue, and our goal is to sell it out. Our goal is to get butts in seats and get people in person, and that's always the model and it's like yes, that is like our bread and butter, that's our core business, and we really had to have conversations with a lot of managers, artists, even people internally at SFJAZZ and just say we don't know to what degree this is going to impact in-person performances and let's give this a shot, let's try to see if we can do both and ultimately our objective is not to give people in the Bay Area that would otherwise be in-person, physically in our building an option to not come and instead stay home and just watch it. Our objective here is to try to get people who are in other parts of the country, other parts of the world that don't have access to a premier performing arts organization and the type of programming that we can stage and new works that we're premiering you know that they're sort of in an art-starved area that they could have access to this, that they could sign up and, you know, start to be able to watch programs that they'd otherwise not be able to see. I think safe to say now, and just what we've seen with ticket sales this past year alone, that it's not really affecting it. There are different audiences. Yes, there's crossover, but I think that's a good thing.
Speaker 2:It's another point of engagement that I met somebody at a show this past January and I sat next to her during the show. She was a super fan of the band that was playing this vocalist, lisa Fisher, and we introduced the show and we said, hey, we're live streaming this and it's going to join a video on demand library. We just launched this new video on demand library for the program. She turned to me after the show. She's like, okay, you're saying that if I sign up I can watch this concert on demand, because she just loved it so much she wanted to experience it again and again and again, share it with her friends. All that. I was like, yeah, it'll be up next week. And sure enough, she signed up next week. So I think that's one person.
Speaker 2:That's sort of one anecdotal case, but it goes to show that there's certainly interest where people who see a live show would want to watch it again digitally. Or maybe if they miss the show, they're out of town that week, they could experience it when they would otherwise be there. And then I think there's a lot of people again that are outside of our geography that can now get access to it. So there was definitely some concern that it wouldn't really work out, but I think we're in a place now where we see that it totally can. And the other piece of this is people are getting back to their lives. People are getting busy again. People are going out and seeing shows and preferring that experience. Are they going to keep tuning in and watching these live streams?
Speaker 2:And again, I think, power to the rhythm we've established over a number of years now. And also, just people are clearly enjoying and valuing what we're putting out and it's definitely our viewership, our membership has been impacted, like everybody else. Every other organization I've talked to has experienced the same. Just, you know, if they got in early and the pandemic like explosive growth and then as things came back and people's lives got busy again and in-person events came back, it dropped down and sort of like hit this floor and it's like generally been a plateau.
Speaker 2:And I, you know there's organizations that we look up to that are, like you know, been doing it, you know, maybe 10 years longer than us and they're seeing the same thing, they're having the same challenges and I think you know so this transitional period we're in is it in particularly a challenge and I think it's going to take persistence to get through it, but I think, long-term it's something that I still very much believe that audience will continue to grow, and what we've seen basically is yes, it has fallen, but there's still a sizable audience that's showing up every week, and the live streams have continued to be a driver of the program, though now we're really trying to invest and build up this on-demand library of videos, both free and some of it only for members, and we feel like that's going to be important to be able to attract people, get people from all these disparate time zones out there to check it out, and try it out.
Speaker 1:You've touched there on what I'd like to talk about next, which is, you know, it was an extraordinary response to an extraordinary time and it's evolved since then and it sounds like it has matured and further developed and you have built out an offering. So it's not just live streams. There's this on-demand library that you mentioned. What are your plans as we sit here in sort of spring 2024, for the next 12, 18 months? I don't know how far ahead you're planning. Is it sort of more of the same and sustaining that, or is it about further evolving the offer and the model and the sort of types of content that you're putting out there?
Speaker 2:I think you can't stay still for too long, and we tried out so many different ways of offering content throughout the pandemic. The model we've sort of landed on is a subscription style model. We call it membership just because we already have a membership program and we're trying to foster a sense of belonging to something that's more than just being transactional with somebody, that there's a community here, that it's mostly through the live chat still, but there's a way for you to meet other people that are fans of this music and in some cases still, we invite the artists into the chat as well. It's actually tonight will be an example of that. The live stream we have tonight and the big shift for us is what we called Fridays at Five. That was just the series is now SF Jazz at Home, which is just the name of the whole program, and so underneath SF Jazz at Home, we have live streams. We have listening parties that we live stream and put up on demand. We have live streams. We have listening parties that we live stream and put up on demand. We have now concerts both from our archive and what were previously premiered as live streams, entering that on a weekly basis, something we hope to grow, and right now we're probably at like 40 titles and so over the next year or two growing that to 100, 200. And I don't know if we need much more than that, because that's so much content and so many concerts to watch and it'll be constantly rotating. So some stuff will fall out, new stuff will enter. We present artists and bring them back, and always with new projects. So a new project from ours might replace one that had been up for a couple of years.
Speaker 2:And the other area that we're really trying to build out is developing sort of digital shorts, where these are non-performance video clips, concepts we do with artists that give people kind of an insight into their influences, their process. One's called Drop the Needle. We drop the needle on vinyl records and have them react to the music and talk about it. One's called the Breakdown, where we asked an artist to break down a musical concept, sort of like a masterclass, but really focused on just one musical concept and keeping it very simple. We have another, called In my Mind, where we're trying to simulate getting into the mind of an artist while they're improvising, so this creative flow state that they get into and how they approach that, you know, things that get them into that headspace ways that they nurture and develop that. We've also started putting up a lot of education content for free. These are mostly existing programs you have, but anything from lecture series to like kid-focused concerts.
Speaker 2:So it's really trying to build out a lot of the videos available and really focusing on making this stuff available on demand and for people to watch at any point. So we have a digital advisory committee. Some board members, some advisors San Francisco we have a lot of people in the tech industry key staff participate in that as well. I think it's really important to establish that For anybody listening to this that works at an organization. You're trying to push things forward digitally.
Speaker 2:I think coming up with some sort of coalition that's more than just staff, but leadership, board level and also just people that are advisors, people who have solved problems like this before, and one of the conversations we had last year before we launched and really started investing in all this new content was okay, like the pricing seems to be solid. You know the live streams are still driving engagement. It feels like one thing we need to solve for is retention. So, like a lot of people are signing up, there's no barrier to do that the cost is low, okay, not a problem. That the cost is low, okay, not a problem.
Speaker 2:Bigger problem is that a lot of people are signing up and they're not sticking around for much longer than a year, or maybe like eight months in the case of people signing up on a monthly basis. That's not to say we're losing everybody, but that was clearly an area that we wanted to improve. So we're attracting a lot of people, but not everyone is sticking around for the longterm. So we felt if we really built out the product offering all these videos and really, you know, made that as strong as it possibly could be, that would improve retention. And so that's you know. Again, we're. We're like three, four months into this and we're just starting to analyze some of the data and too soon to tell the effect. I think we'll have to wait like six to 12 months to really know. But the response, I would say the engagement that we've been able to see immediately and people are showing up, people are watching this stuff.
Speaker 1:There was no benchmark for it, but it's clearly like people are spending a lot more time with SFJazz at home, and over the last couple of months, and maybe to finish, there's so much in what you've described here that I think will be inspiring and sort of energizing for people listening to this and it feels like there's a lot of ideas and principles that other organizations could borrow. But, reflecting on all the work you've done over the last six years or longer, what do you think the sort of the big important things are? If other organizations are thinking really seriously about a digital content strategy that is, delivering artistic content to digital audiences, what do you think the big lessons are that you may have learned at SFJAZZ that others could use as a starting point? Lessons are that you may have learned at SFJAZZ that others could use as a starting point.
Speaker 2:Do your homework first of all, and I mean there's so many great and successful examples and I think it can be easy to look at an example, like I mentioned, digital Concert Hall earlier, and we've looked at other organizations in the US Met, opera On Demand, another leader in the arts, as well as digitally. I think it's easy to look at them and be like, okay, they are so much bigger than us, they have so much more resource than us, and I would say, don't see that as necessarily a limiting factor. Look at more the principles, at what they're doing and what's their rhythm. How much content do they have? How are they talking about this program? How are they marketing it? How are they placing it within their organization? Who is it for? Is it for their existing audience? Is it for a completely different audience? And just so, thinking about those really fundamental questions, like a format question you had earlier how long are these? Are they just doing a video representation of the same program that's happening on their stage? Are they doing certain things that are more specific to the at-home, on your couch in front of a TV experience? I think that's really important to have in mind. The two are not necessarily like oh, if you just film the in-person thing, that's all you got to do.
Speaker 2:There's an opportunity, I think, to shape something that is much more for the at-home audience specifically. It doesn't have to be perfect, I think would be the other point which we talked about. And, again, like the grace that I talked about with the pandemic and people willing to try something out and for it not to be perfect, it was a particular context where that was sort of the prevalent attitude, and I think there's still a way you can approach launching something similarly and just, I think, not presenting a way of like this is finished, this is a perfect thing. We worked really hard on it. We want you to enjoy it, I think just saying like, hey, this is a conversation with you, we want to know what do you think of it? Would you watch this? Would you share it with a friend? Would you tune in every week to watch this, or how often would you want to watch something like this? And surveys can help.
Speaker 2:I think, honestly, a lot of arts organizations have the benefit of a really engaged core audience and those are sort of like your super fans and just listening to those people and ultimately, you just want to get more people like that that are really in your orbit and fans of what you're doing and will be critical but also patient with you, especially if you listen to them. And then I think ultimately there's kind of two paths you can take. Digitally, you can go for the premium, top level, highest production, quality experience, and I acknowledge that that's definitely what what sf jazz is trying to do. Um, and that's that's tough because, like you, both need to be able to capture video, audio and needs to be at the highest quality, but also what you do on stage needs to be of the highest quality.
Speaker 2:We kind of live in this world where it's like, you know, celebrities and like big artists are kind of driving the attention and you know, just you know, social media alone and followership there like it's becoming a very celebrity driven industry. And you know, if you, if you're not presenting sort of the best artists in your whatever your field, is like that's that's an uphill battle, that's a challenge, you know, and so it's definitely another benefit that SF jazz has is like we do have like the best jazz artists on our stage and we are able to work with them and get them to engage in the digital program. So it's like, if you don't have, like, I think, some of those ingredients, there's sort of another approach that you can take, which is I would call it more like the YouTuber approach. This is much scrappier and I think what it really takes is the right concept, the right product format, and you need to find something that people aren't doing yet. You need to figure out a way to tell a certain story or a certain point of view on something, and as much as SFJAZZ has set a bar in the jazz world and I think there's other organizations that have been able to accomplish something similar too, don't get me wrong. But as SF, jazz has set sort of a bar in the jazz world, and I think there's other organizations that have been able to accomplish something similar too, don't get me wrong.
Speaker 2:But there have also been a lot of jazz artists that have really exploded on YouTube during the pandemic, and they did it in a much scrappier way. There's an artist that we're going to have in a couple months here, this guy, emmett Cohen, pianist from Israel, and he just started doing live streams out of his apartment in New York and I mean he has amassed a ton of subscribers on YouTube. It's a different model. He's not really doing the subscription model, but he does a Monday session on YouTube and it started out very scrappy. He's gotten better video equipment over time as the thing has grown. But I think it takes coming up with a certain approach, doing it super scrappy and low cost out of the gate and, just most importantly, can this catch an audience? And if that happens, you can grow it pretty organically and slowly and sometimes much quicker than you could have ever believed. So that would be what I would call the YouTuber approach, where you put stuff out there and try to grow an audience.
Speaker 2:That is, more voting with their time and their eyeballs and then eventually figuring out a way to hey support me by some merch ways that they can connect with you more directly and maybe financially support the program. Hopefully that's encouraging to people to not say, okay, if we're not at like the highest level, this won't be possible. And I say that too because, like what I'm hearing a lot in sort of networks of presenters is a lot of people are abandoning their digital programs. You know, oh, it was just something that was for the pandemic and you know, it's like people aren't really showing up and like if all they're seeing is a couple dozen people tuning into a live stream. I totally get that perspective, but I think that's a good indicator.
Speaker 2:Okay, this thing isn't working, but what if we approached it in a different way? And maybe our end goal is not to create the biggest streaming series in our art form, but it's instead to make 10-minute videos that are working with people that have an interesting story to share or an interesting lesson to teach or impart. There's so many directions you can go with that, but it doesn't necessarily have to be like the thing that everybody was trying to do during the pandemic to stay connected with their audience. So I'll leave it there, but hopefully that's encouraging to people.
Speaker 1:I absolutely think it is, and thank you so much for your time today, russ. I think there's so much in the SF jazz story that should provide useful ideas and inspiration for the folks that listen to this podcast, so thank you so much for taking the time my pleasure.
Speaker 2:Thanks for having me. And yeah, what you're doing with the podcast is great and I'll just say you know so many organizations are dealing with the podcast is great and I'll just say you know so many organizations are dealing with the same challenges. So I think it's cool to have a place that's kind of centering and featuring a lot of that discussion. Look forward to listening to more.
Speaker 1:And that is everything for today. Thanks for listening. You can find all episodes of the podcast. Sign up for the newsletter and find out about our events on our website, the digital dot works. You can also find us on linkedin. Now that twitter is a total garbage fire, our theme tune is vienna, beat by blue dot sessions. And, last but not least, thanks to mark cotton for his editing support on this episode. See you again soon.
