12 months ago at SFMusicTech, I talked to StageIt founder and CEO Evan Lowenstein about what he called “the new intimacy economy”. And last week at SFMusicTech, I met again with Lowenstein, a former popular musician himself, to talk about StageIt’s progress and how he is helping reinvent the music industry by enabling a new kind of intimacy between artist and audience.
Backed by angel investments from Jimmy Buffet and Sean Parker, StageIt offers musicians a live video platform to connect with their fans. It’s what Lowenstein calls a “video Twitter” – although he is determined to fight the “phantom metrics” that, he says, assume that Twitter followers or Facebook friends automatically translate into a paying audience of fans. Instead, he argues, artists need to use digital venues like StageIt to rebuild their intimacy with their audience. StageIt’s secret sauce, Lowenstein insists, is “standing out of the way of artists and fans” and so far it seems to be doing a good job – with 4,000 bands already signed up to the platform and 800 actually doing business on it.
Like Nataly and Jack at Pomplamoose, Evan Lowenstein’s innovation is rebuilding the music industry in the Internet economy. In a year’s time, he expects not only to have moved his video platform into other verticals, but also to be profitable. I hope he is successful. We need more entrepreneurs like Lowenstein simultaneously committed to both realizing revenue and helping reestablish the trust between artist and audience in our digital age.