In the middle of the Covid lockdown in March 2020, we set out to launch VIERLIVE. A new streaming platform specialized in streaming concerts with ticket sales. Why? Because while artists could make a quick buck doing free live sets from their living room, with viewers voluntarily donating—other members of the cultural industry, like sound and light technicians stage workers, were left out cold without work.

Challenge

Why the heck should people pay for something they could watch for free on Facebook, Youtube and Twitch? Our challenge was to convince them that an online concert is worth the ticket you pay for.

A new concert format was baked into the service. More than just an online concert, this was a VIERLIVE experience. With 6 film directors and 10 artists we set out to give people a new live format our audience had never seen before.

To present the new live format and launch the platform, we hosted SOMEWHERE ELSE—

A digital escape from reality, in the form of an online music festival, at a time when everyone was stuck in their homes. In stark contrast to your humdrum Facebook-couch-concert, we cleared the stage for 10 unique live shows, letting directors and artists take you somewhere else.

This way, the festival became our campaign—highlighting the shows through our own and the artists’ channels—before and after each live broadcast. The PR strategy was to create discussions, debates and positive attention towards VIERLIVE.

Show don´t tell.

To get people on board with the idea of both watching and paying for an online concert we needed to get the medias attention. We invited music journalists to each event and encouraged them into writing reviews on the new music format.

Our target audience was broad: the Norwegian population. Therefore we invited all the major news channels and focused on wide spread (but on a limited budget) in social media channels.

Each concert and all that happened in them became the source of content that was distributed across all channels.

The festival and the concerts became our campaign—highlighting the shows through our own and the artists’ channels—before and after each live broadcast. The PR strategy was to create discussions, debates and positive attention towards VIERLIVE.

The livestream itself became a media channel, and content from the live shows were then distributed into different bought media channels to spread the word about the new format and the new streaming platform.

51. 423 tickets sold for all events

650.000 unique visitors to the platform (Population 5,3 million)

2000 culture workers were employed

130 new events created in 2020

279 press mentions in major news channels