If you are a musician and rely on love performances in front of a live audience to make a living, being stuck at home and not able to have gigs is a major setback. In order to be successful during these hard times, musicians must resort to streaming performances live over the internet to have a chance at getting some of that revenue back. I think a very important part in being successful during the pandemic is advertising yourself. Getting as much reach as possible is the best way to get more people to listen to your music and maybe even come watch your livestreams. Because everyone is stuck inside all the time, advertising yourself is easier than ever. All you need is a simple Instagram ad with part of one of your songs in it and you can start bringing in new fans. All you need is a linktree attached to it and you can list Apple Music, Spotify, and all of your social media accounts for people to follow. Once you have new fans hooked on your music and following your socials, you can start promoting livestream gigs. A few weeks in advance you should bring it up; on an Instagram story for example. That way people see it at the top of their feed and it stands out more. As the performance date gets closer and closer, continuing to promote it can bring in some last minute people who weren’t initially sure if they wanted to watch it. You can even sell tickets to the livestream in order to actually make some money. Something you want to avoid though is charging too much. Charging as much for a livestream as an in-person performance will likely push away potential viewers, so you want the pricing to be reasonable. If you’re a bit bigger of an artist and sell merch of some kind, you can even have that going during the livestream. Something interesting I’ve seen if merch exclusive to the livestream concert. This would definitely entice people to buy it due to the limited supply. With enough people on the stream because of advertising beforehand, there is great potential for lots of money to be made. Something I’ve seen another artist do (Ruel) recently during the pandemic is sell extremely exclusive one-of-a kind merch on a website called Depop. Almost everything he was selling was signed, and they were all pieces you couldn’t get anywhere else, such as a tye-dye hoodie that is the only one in existence. He also was selling some pieces form his own wardrobe that he used in the music videos for his latest EP. This is an incredibly creative idea because even if you can’t get merch produced, you can always sell off very recognizable items that you’ve used in music videos at a higher cost than you bought them for just to make a little bit of extra money. This same artist also did a livestream concert where he had about 10 socially distanced in-person seats for the filming of a rooftop concert, and then he sold tickets to watch said recording in a steam the next night. I think this was very well done and more artists should definitely give some thought into different ways of charging money for watching them online.