Being a musician in 2020 is a very different experience than it’s ever been, and not just because COVID-19 has mostly shut down concerts all over the world. Arjun Mehta, co-founder and CEO of livestreaming digital platform Moment House, told PYMNTS in a recent conversation that the landscape for artists was already radically changing even before the pandemic hit.
He said that for pretty much the first time in history, every artist is by default a global artist in a world that’s interconnected by the web and a plethora of social media and digital channels.
“Artists and creatives have created all these tribes of fans all over the world, and every artist [and] creator is global from day one,” Mehta said. “It doesn’t matter who you are, every artist is now able to develop core fan bases all around the world.”
Develop, but not really deepen all that effectively — largely because social media services throw so much content at users that artists (particularly new ones) can struggle to control those channels, he said. And even if they can, global fan bases are extremely difficult for artists to monetize. Each stream on Apple Music or Spotify will only drop a few cents (at most) into a musician’s pocket.
Mehta said Moment House was created to offer artists a new option to connect with fans: livestreamed performances that musicians can sell tickets to.
“There needs to be a place on the internet that can bring together the core fans of any artist or any creative and [let] them feel like they’re part of a special moment together,” he said. “That’s why we built this.”
Not Just A COVID-Related Business
The natural assumption Moment House gets when it describes its products is that the firm was created in reaction to COVID-19 putting the kibosh on artists’ touring plans. But Mehta said the platform has been under development since 2019 and wouldn’t work as just a quick pivot to ticketed livestreamed shows.
“We’re not looking at this problem as: ‘Hey, let’s build a ticketed livestream app because artists can’t tour,’” he said. “We think that is a very limited view, and there’s a very low ceiling on that business.”
The product with a wider future is one that offers something more than a quick digitization of an experience that used to be live. Instead, Moment House aims to host something designed to be a digital connection point that actually speaks to the human need for belonging.
For artists, that means offering events where it’s easy to interact with fans via engaging digital events that musicians can monetize through digital ticketing. For fans, it’s about offering what Mehta called an “elegant” and “premium-quality” experience that justifies a ticket’s price.
“The fans should walk out saying, ‘This was awesome. This was epic. When’s the next moment?’” he said. “We’re all about working backwards from that feeling, because the onus is on us to craft the product that can evoke those feelings.”
Helping Create A Music-Industry ‘Middle Class’
The goal on the front end is to create a user experience for fans all over the world that’s easy for artists and consumers to access. But Mehta said that’s a complicated undertaking on the back end.
That’s especially true when it comes to Moment House’s core offering as a platform — monetization. Taking payments in from all over the world and paying them out to artists has required a very solid partnership with Stripe — and a willingness to use lots of in-house engineering time on top of that.
But Mehta said that’s worth doing, because not every musical artist in the world is selling out stadiums and releasing multi-platinum albums. Superstar artists are going to do just fine because they have established fan bases in the millions, but Moment House aims to create a salable product that less-famous artists can control and profit from.
Consider a budding rap artist who’s working a day job as a Starbucks barista and has 100 fans spread from Brazil to Hong Kong. Mehta said such a performer isn’t launching a world tour or bringing in bank from streaming services.
“But if he can sell 100 $10 tickets, that is $1,000,” Mehta said. “Now this kid can pay his rent. That’s what I am excited about — creating a whole middle class of artists by providing such a powerful monetization tool, putting it into their hands and making it really, really simple to use. For us it’s about creating that new category and this new unit of a moment that can build a new artist middle class.”
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