Somebody wanted to hear the Brahms Double Concerto played live and could not find anywhere to look it up. That is the origin of the Live Music Project. Founder Shia Lyon went looking, and discovered that Seattle alone had around thirty community orchestras publishing their entire concert season as a JPEG. Megan Ihnen is now its executive director.

• An image is invisible to search. Around thirty Seattle orchestras had put their whole season into a picture file, so as far as Google was concerned the concerts were not happening.
• Listener agency is the product. Filter by piece, composer, instrument, price, house concert against concert hall, or sensory-friendly format.
• Spontaneous Free Tickets turns donated seats into audience development, with post-concert surveys fed back to organisations that almost never hear from first-time attendees.
• The software is built in-house by volunteers. Corporate matching hours from Seattle tech employers plus bootcamp graduates who need public-facing portfolio work.
• They ran the programmes manually for years before automating them. Which is why the automation fits what actually happens.
• Geographic expansion before new art forms. A deliberate order, and the opposite of what most non-profits do.

• The concert season nobody could search
• Listener agency
• Spontaneous Free Tickets
• Shipping software on a volunteer dev team
• Sponsorship that does not extract from the arts
• People, ideas and sources mentioned
• Questions this episode answers
• Go deeper

She sees that their concert season is a JPEG on their website and realizes like, Google can’t scan this. Google has no idea that this concert is happening, right?

This is the whole problem in one sentence, and it is not unique to classical music. Any small organisation that publishes its schedule as a designed image has removed itself from search. The information is on the site. It is just not readable.

For a community orchestra the cost is direct. Someone in the same city is actively looking for the thing you are performing, and there is no path from their search to your hall.

The Live Music Project calls itself a classical music advocacy and tech-for-good organisation. Its answer to the discovery problem is a calendar built around how people actually decide to go to a concert.

• By piece, so the Brahms Double Concerto search that started all this now returns something.
• By composer and by instrument.
• By price, which quietly removes the biggest barrier for new attendees.
• By format: house concert against concert hall, and sensory-friendly performances.

But we’re using technology to make that easy. Just make it easy to be curious.

Organisations donate unsold seats. The project gets them to people who would not otherwise come. Then the part that makes it a programme rather than a giveaway: attendees answer a post-concert survey, and the responses go back to the organisation.

Small ensembles alm...