After the pandemic shut down live music venues, some artists have turned to sites like Stageit to livestream performances with typical viewers paying around $15
up from just 747 in February—and the company booked more than $1 million in revenue for the month, double what it made during all of last year. 😮 https://www.bloomberg.com/... Rhett Miller / @rhettmiller : If you had told me one month ago that I would somehow be the face of online gigs during a pandemic, I would never have believed you. And yet, here we are. That said, tune in tonight! https://www.bloomberg.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Stageit's surge is the monetized version of a shift already underway: days earlier, Bloomberg reported that livestreaming had become an ad hoc support system for the music and nightlife industry under lockdown. The difference now is the price tag — where performers once relied on virtual tip jars on YouNow and live.ly, fans here pay around $15 a show, and Stageit booked more than $1 million for the month, roughly double what it made in all of last year.
That revenue signal matters because it converts emergency improvisation into a market other platforms can price against. Within the following year, both Bandcamp and Spotify had built their own ticketed offerings, making the paid virtual concert a contested category rather than one company's workaround.
First-order effects
- Artists such as Rhett Miller gain a direct-to-fan ticket revenue stream while venues are shut, with typical viewers paying around $15 per performance.
- Stageit's monthly revenue topped $1 million — roughly double its total for all of last year — validating paid ticketed shows over free or tip-based formats.
Second-order effects
- Rival platforms move to capture the same fan spending: Bandcamp launched Bandcamp Live with artist-set tickets starting at $1 and waived fees into 2021, while Spotify entered with $15 prerecorded concerts from acts like The Black Keys.
- The parallel DJ livestreaming boom exposes a payment split the ticket model doesn't solve — the performer earns directly, while the artists who made the records being played go uncompensated.
Third-order effects
- If ticketed streaming outlasts lockdowns, live-music economics split into physical venues and platform-mediated digital shows, with platforms competing on fee structure and format (live versus prerecorded) rather than reach alone.
- Compensation for recorded-work creators becomes a structural question for the category: whoever standardizes how songwriters and rights holders share in ticket revenue shapes whether livestreaming complements touring or substitutes for it.
The trend: Paid livestreaming is graduating from pandemic stopgap to a standing product category, as music platforms race to own the ticketed virtual concert.