Zoom can eat it!

When it comes to live streaming shows, everyone sucks pretty bad. That’s a bad thing for audiences, but a good thing for you if you’re just starting out. You can be a big fish.

A long time ago, I wrote about THE 5 ELEMENTS OF A GREAT LIVE SHOW. This was when “live show” generally meant IRL performances. Now, there’s a lot of people entertaining via web video. There’s a big difference. Below are a few of my patches, but really I encourage creators to think completely differently about this medium and reinvent what a live show can be on camera.

1. Detail

There is a lot of detail missing from the experience of a video show.

• The viewpoint is limited to whatever direction the camera is pointing
• The camera pixels send only so much info to the viewer
• Audio and video are compressed for transmission
• There’s no smell. There’s no feeling the air. There’s no bumping into others.
• There’s no depth. It’s 2D
• The audio is best limited to only the thing that an audience came for unlike in a IRL show where you hear everything in the room and your brain picks out the important stuff

PATCHES: You can’t completely fix everything, but you can adjust a little bit for this lack of detail. Use the tricks that TV and movies use. You can’t turn video 3d, but you can move your camera and use lighting to clarify the depth of what people are seeing. In real life you can wiggle your head to understand perspective. You can do the same with the camera.

You can pickup more detail of important subjects by zooming in and pulling away or moving them closer and further from the camera.

Don’t be limited to just the audio of the thing you’re doing. Bringing in sound effects can be cheesy, or they can be helpful, or both. Throwing in a little pre recorded vid with audio can make the world you’re creating fuller.

Include interesting props and set decorations to make things visually stimulating. You could even mail things to the attendees ahead of time so they get more of a sensory experience.

2. Exclusivity

Exclusivity is the most valuable thing in a live stage show. When something’s put on camera, it often loses the exclusivity.

• streaming can be done for a bigger audience than an IRL show
• video can be recorded and shown again
• watching something on screen triggers that feeling in our brains even if the audience is small and it isn’t recordable

PATCHES: First, make it extremely clear how exclusive the stream is. Whatever makes it special, reiterate it. Remind people it’s special and why.

Fire Leopard’s Leopard Stream is “not recorded” and they put that in their promo, so you know the thing you’re seeing is only for you and the other people watching at that moment.

Make it cost more. I think the default thinking is that “This is from home, I can do this the easy way,” but creators need to bring increased cost to make up for the loss of specialness. Dream of ways that you can make each individual stream more costly. Spend more energy pouring sweat? Put yourself in more danger? Eat a raw onion as fast as possible? Shave off all your hair? Break an expensive oven? These are great gifts to the audience.

Make it chancier. Include more interaction than ever. Format your stream to change dramatically with viewer input, then they know that it’s just for them.

If you’re doing things for a specific group of people, you could have that group’s logo on EVERYTHING. It goes on the set, props, etc. If it’s on a specific date, do the same thing. Make it all happen right there, then and never again.

3. Malleability

The feeling of malleability is omnipresent in a stage show. The interface for interacting and affecting a performance is built in — laugh / clap / heckle. In an online show, all that stuff is gone.

PATCHES: How is an audience to put a dent in your show and make it theirs? Again, MORE interaction!! The show needs to have interaction built in. It’s not just let them leave comments or chat messages. It means asking for certain kinds of interactions, giving them a lot of ways to connect, and making those interactions matter to the content of the performance.

Studies show that the number of followers someone has is directly proportional the number of IQ points they don’t have.

… and if you believe that statement, it probably is because it validates your lack of fans. Well, don’t worry, I’m going to continue to validate that, but with true, actual, real information. This isn’t about being brainy, this is about making brainy use of your fanbase and expanding your impact with force.

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Here, I went on Facebook video and shared my thoughts on how to be more badass in the robot apocalypse, how to make money off tiktok, how to format the pay structure of online courses, how long do you thrash, and planning for retirement.

So many people in entertainment are trying to change their business to make things work now. I wrote about the two ways to do this, but neither of them are actually about changing. They’re about starting new businesses. The problem many of us have is that we didn’t start our first business well. We were young and broke and it didn’t matter.

Now, we have responsibilities like mortgages and bookies that demand payment. We can’t jump in with no business plan and see what happens.

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At this time more than ever, people are facing a great weakness. Their own willpower.

There’s a common fiction that tells us prolific people are busy getting stuff done because they have amazing willpower. Even prolific people say “I must have willpower because I did all this stuff others couldn’t do. I guess I’ll tell people that willpower is the way!”

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It’s impossible to separate the creator from the creation.

The reason I don’t like cover songs is the same reason I don’t watch Woody Allen movies.

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covid makes you cough

Many contagious diseases cause your body to do an involuntary thing like puke or cough or sneeze and this makes transmission of the disease super awesome! The user downloads the virus, then shares.

The common belief about viral content (videos, articles, memes, etc.) is that they are so good, they trigger an involuntary response to share. This isn’t how it works. People aren’t just coughing buzzfeed articles all over their friends faces because of great quality.

Sharing is not involuntary. It’s expensive.

When you share something with friends, coworkers, family, you are making a statement. You’re vouching for the content. You’re attaching it to your name and your reputation. I know, it sounds heavy, but this is what you’re doing each time you share. It’s not the same as liking something in private.

Sharing is a thoughtful response. It’s not involuntary.

Entertainment creators are tool builders not virologists

When I consume a viral video, it is really a social tool. It’s not about how I enjoy the video as much as how much I think the video will help me socially. When I share this, what will it do for me? Maybe it demonstrates…

• my intellegence
• I know about the underground
• my great sense of humor
• my creepy sense of humor
• my deep knowledge of a subject
• where I see myself in society
• that I’m a curator
• a justification of my life choices

To keep this in my mind when creating stuff I imagine the headline “Study finds people with tattoos have higher IQs”

Is everyone gonna share this? No! People dedicated to tattoos who feel marginalized because if it will. People with kids that are heavily tattooed will. People who think they have something funny to say on the topic “If I would have gotten these tats earlier, maybe I would have gotten my GED!”

Nets Level

To go beyond viral is to use the network effect. The network effect means when something is shared, it’s core value increases. If you have a telephone, but nobody you want to talk to has one, your telephone is useless. A phone is for talking to people. The more people there are to talk to, the more valuable the phone gets, this motivates every phone owner to ask more people to get phones. That’s how facebook got big.

The thing that is crucial with this is that it has to be the core value. So, having your friends buy the same car as you, might be fun, but that’s not the network effect. The network effect would be getting more people in your motorcycle gang to buy motorcycles.

You can build the opposite of viral too

If people like what you do want to hoard it, that can hurt your shareability. Let’s say you have a limited capacity venue, your ticket buyers might not want it to get too popular. Or, you could have a live stream where viewers make requests. Their requests are less likely to be picked if the audience is huge.

/// BREAKING NEWS /// Small audiences suck!

I’m learning more and more about how wrong I was about audience size. Selling tickets, getting TV viewers, snagging big podcast downloads… These are not best built organically. These are not the reason to do what we do. These are the METHODS to do what we do.

A Christmas Story

Last year, I was working for a living doing a bunch of other gigs and stuff. Scot Nery’s Boobietrap when available is on Wednesday nights. It takes up a reasonable amount of my time, but it’s not the way I pay my bills; so when people were telling me to add on weekend shows for the holidays, I flinched. That’s a lot of extra work that wouldn’t really benefit me or anyone involved much.

I had a long chat with Colin Campbell who suggested “What if you do weekend shows to promote the Wednesday shows?”

I had never thought of it this way before. Weekend shows sell out faster, people think differently about going out on a weekend than a week day. We would have a different group of people we could convince of the experience of Boobietrap.

Suddenly it was worthwhile to do a weekend show. Not just more people and more fun, but building on the popularity of the weekly juggernaut.

We rearranged how the system worked and got to pay everyone a little more. The promotions were easy for these special shows. They were also family friendly, so it was cake. The weekend shows were popular and the Wednesday shows grew.

We need big audiences

This is becoming more and more clear to me as I see people working hard for a 15 audience member live stream. You can see it right there on the corner of the video player. 15 people are watching this for free. Or, a video with all kinds of planning and post production getting 110 downloads.

Maybe we’re practicing. Trying out a concept to build the show we’re going to do. Awesome. That can be done and erased from the web, but if we’re presenting a real product, let’s get real and go big.

The downsides of a small audience

I just want to quickly remind the reader all the small parts that go into small audiences sucking.

• less attention for what we do
• less impact on the world
• less legacy
• less direct income ( ticket buyers / subscribers / product purchasers)
• less residual income ( audience building profits, merch sales, secondary sales )
• less 3rd party income ( sponsors, investors, grants, peer donations )
• worse audience experience ( it can be embarrassing to do something only 8 other people are doing )
• worse creator experience ( it sucks to make something for few people )
• because of income, it may not be sustainable. The creator might not be able to stick with it when bills come due and other work -work with paychecks – comes in
• fewer other creatives want to get aboard a sinking ship

Grassroots are dirty

My old thinking — maybe the common thinking — is. “make something great, tell people about it, and it will catch on.” My new thinking is, “make something great, part of it being great is that people want it, part of it being great is that it ensnares audiences, part of it being great is it’s made to grow itself… and then bring in a big audience to start the machine working.”

Small entertainment is hard to grow. Not only do you have little word of mouth, but you create something small, get it working, then it wouldn’t really work big. For example, you start a live stream where your thing is you respond to every comment. You get 1000 viewers and you can’t keep up anymore.

Buy your audience

The simple formula for great advertising is…

[cost of acquisition] + [cost of serving a customer] < [lifetime value of customer]

Basically: The money you spend on advertising is less than you get back. This is important to remember for scaling your business, but at the beginning, you have to spend more on advertising to get a big audience to start because the audience is part of the advertising.

If you don’t have money, you have to use other resources. Possibly legwork. Possibly calling individual people and telling them to download your ebook so that you reach a best-seller status on Amazon.

Before buying your audience, set a Boobietrap

In my fixing church post I talk about keeping audiences. You wanna set up stuff for your entertainment product that 1) keep them around and 2) get money from them. If you have unlimited funds, replace “get money from them” with “make the impact you want” because no matter what I’m sure you’re doing things so that you make a difference.

It would be a total waste to buy an audience just to let them vanish.

If you want repeat customers, you have to be aggressive. To keep them around…

• FOMO what’s built in to what you do that compels someone to come back for more? A few laughs is not enough
• Lock in why does it hurt to walk away from your product?
• Sunk costs what makes it feel like a prudent choice to stick around?
• Fandom what connects with your audience’s highest needs?
• Network effect how does telling every friend make your audience’s experience better
• Remarket what’s a way you can capture your audience’s contact information? it’s a lot easier to talk to someone who already likes you than constantly reaching out to new folks.

To get money from them…

• sell them the product ( I mean the very one they’re experiencing by selling tickets or whatever)
• upsell them a product enhancement ( like buy a beer while you’re here and the show will be funnier )
• use your high audience volume as a way to lure advertisers or other money people.
• sell them something for their fandom ( t shirts or something)
• sell them a different product that taps in to the thing they like about the current product.

If I read this five years ago

I don’t know what I would have thought. It all might have sounded kind of conniving to do all this thoughtful stuff.

Now, I’m thinking if you start without even considering how this stuff will grow, you’re missing out. Starting with a big audience serves everyone involved. The techniques for “trapping” audiences are also the techniques that make experiences fulfilling for them.

Sound is moving air. I microphone picks up the movement either through wiggliness or compression and turns it into electricity.

Microphone aiming

1. Unidirectional mics can hear in one direction like a telescope. You point them at the hole in your mouth and they will not pickup a ton of other noise.
2. Omnidirectional mics listen in all directions. You put them close to your mouth and they will pick up everything that’s going on around them, but if your mouth is close, they will pickup your voice louder than everything else.
3. Shotgun mics have two microphones. They listen like a telescope, but then they also have another microphone that listens to the ambient noise and tries to cancel it out. They are good if you want to get space between your mouth and the mic. Like if you are shooting video and you want the microphone to be off camera.

Microphone Styles

1. Headset is worn either on your ear or attached to your head. It is away from your face and close to your mouth. Usually these are unidirectional and right there where they need to be. Used for stage presentations, telemarketers. It’s good for cutting out background noise and wind, with mobility, hands-free
2. Lavalier is worn on a clip on a shirt ( stage presentations ), on the hairline (broadway shows), or concealed under clothing (tv & film). They’re omnidirectional, so need to be close and in a relatively quiet environment.
3. Hand-held / mounted these are the typical mics from the pictures you see. They can be omni or uni or shotgun.

The goal is flawless audio from the start

An audience can shut their eyes, or look away from visuals, but they can’t shut their ears. We gotta make audio superb in everything. The only thing we can really do in the alteration of audio feeds / recordings is to remove data from the audio. We can’t photoshop it. As audio compresses for transfer through wires and even internet, it loses quality and clarity.

If you record with noisy background, echo, extra mouth noises, and you remove them in post, you’ll also be removing some of the good stuff that you want to share. No way around it.

Noise is everywhere

The A/C, your neighbors, helicopters, instruments, audio playback, your fridge can all make background noise. Ways to reduce it include unplugging and turning off anything noisy, wear headphones to hear audio you need to hear, plan things around quiet times, close windows, do things in places with heavy walls.

You want your face to be super close to the input device too, but if you breathe on the mic, you can make the microphone pop when you use plosives. Wind shields and pop guards can prevent your breath from making noise. Also, depending on how your mouth makes words, you might be able to change the position of a mic so it and your breath are in a long-distance relationship.

Echo sounds like it could be cool, but if you don’t have control over it, it sucks. It can also make a small room sound small and amateurish. Sound bounces like a billiard ball off hard surfaces at right angles. If the room you’re in is a cube made of marble, you’ll have a lot of echo. You wanna get weird angles and softness around you. I’ve recorded things in bed under a big blanket. It’s hot, but not echo-y!

Hard room fixes: don’t talk straight towards a wall talk at an angle. Put something soft behind the microphone so you’re talking either into the microphone or into that soft pile of towels. Talk quieter with the microphone closer. Put more things in the room that are soft or angled. If a sound bounces one time before coming back to the mic it’s stronger than if it bounces twice.

Microphone quality

Microphone quality matters more than you may be able to detect. Our brains add closure to sounds we hear. We cognitively fill the gap. If a brain is working too hard to imagine what’s not there, it might not pickup the message or the beauty of the sound that is there. If someone’s listening to your voice with background music or at double speed on a podcast, clarity will be super crucial to their enjoyment.

Good quality microphones…

• are sensitive and can pickup sounds easily
• have big dynamic range. That means they can hear low pitched and high pitched sounds.
• have balance in that range so that they don’t pickup one frequency more than another

Covid isn’t negatively affecting everyone in the entertainment industry, but some are left not knowing what to do now. If you’re that, this is that for you.

As I’m coaching entertainment pros thru this moment, I want them to thrive. I always want my clients to get way more from me than they pay me, so these are the three routes we go. Feel free to mix and match them too!

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“You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help other people get what they want.” – Zig Ziglar

In most categories of entertainment, there are a lot of candidates for every gig / job. So, we have trouble sticking out, or sticking in the mind of potential clients. It seems like we’re all coming at it from the same direction of “I’m good, use me.” That is a lottery approach instead of a strategy approach.

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The old stuff isn’t good because it’s old.

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