Live to your Living Room is a curated programme of events designed to deliver the very best of folk, roots, and acoustic music to people's homes. The service targets anybody with barriers to access, particularly those who are unable to leave the house. It is run by a small but flexible team, with the support of part-time contractors and external event staff.
The service now has 4,000 people on its mailing list, with online and hybrid events ranging from around 30-1,000 attendees. What makes Live to Your Living Room different to other streaming companies is the commitment to cultivating the same shared feeling of connection and community online that eventgoers feel in person.
We interviewed Cat McGill, Creative Director at Live to Your Living Room, to learn more about why she and her partner, Pete Ord, set up the initiative. Cat gives us insight into what the service offers its target audiences and how they are measuring impact to determine its success. We also get a sneak peek into what’s next for Live to Your Living Room, including plans to make the model one that can be taught to other organisations and efforts to embed this experience of live music as normal on a broader cultural level.
What are your motivations for addressing diversity and inclusion and running Live to Your Living Room?
That's a tricky one to answer because it's so much a part of what we do. It would never occur to me not to do it. I've worked in disability arts for a good 20 years or so; I'm autistic and have chronic illnesses and disabilities, as do my children—so it's just a part of my life. It's woven through everything.
A really important part of our mission at Live to Your Living Room is to recognise the barriers that people face and the reason we formed was due to the barriers people were facing to access live music during lockdown. When things started opening up again, we recognised that lockdown had become much more accessible than the previous 'normal', for want of a better word.
I remember a lot of people during lockdown, in the area I work in, saying, 'Oh, wouldn't it be great if we could keep this going and we could keep this access going'. So, we did—we just kept going with all the lessons we had learned.
Who is Live to Your Living Room targeting?
Anybody who faces any kind of barrier to accessing performing arts. It also benefits artists who face access barriers. We've got performers who are disabled, old, or geographically isolated and Live to Your Living Room means they can perform from their own homes if they need to.
It also benefits audiences that say the gigs they want to see don't come anywhere near them, as well as parents, carers, older people, and people who don't feel safe to go out. For example, we've done focus groups, and we've had women say they don't feel safe going to a gig on their own—but Live to Your Living Room means they don't have to miss out. It also helps with the cost of everything around going out to a gig and the people who can't afford that.
So, my passion is disability, from a professional and personal point of view, but with Live to Your Living Room, we think of it in terms of barriers to leaving the house, whatever the barrier may be. We then try and find a way to remove that barrier.
Can you tell us more about what Live to Your Living Room offers?
We currently offer a series of live music events that are held on Zoom, but they're curated in a very particular way whereby we think very carefully about the experience of the audience. The default for this kind of experience tends to be to put a camera in the room and just stream whatever's happening in that room—but we do things differently.
We think about how we can give the online audience similar feelings of connection and community that they would get from going to a gig in person. So, we have a host for all of the gigs who will talk to the audience and the audience can engage in the chatbox. We also sometimes have games, raffles and interviews with the artists where the audience can submit questions for them to answer.
Now everything is opened back up, we also do a lot of hybrid gigs from venues—but we still have all the same curation aspects. What we're working towards, which we've achieved with one of our partners, is where we have the Zoom host coming out of front-of-house speakers so they can say hello to the venue audience. Then, we unmute the Zoom audience, and they can wave and cheer and say hello as well.
How are you measuring the impact of this EDI activity?
We've got some quite distinct types of data and we get quite a lot of unsolicited feedback from people. The vast majority of it is people saying thank you and is really good feedback because people are so excited about having something they can access. We get a lot of people saying things like, 'I've seen more live music through you guys than I ever have before', or 'My children now get to experience live music', or 'I'm now able to be independent and see the gig I want to see without relying on other people'.
We've also done surveys over the years—general ones and specific ones around hybrid gigs. We've surveyed the in-person audience and the online audience and found that on the whole, both of them enjoy knowing that the other audience is there.
We've also done some focus groups and at the end of last year, we did some specific focus groups around access and barriers. They were paid groups and they were deliberately aimed at both people who had been to our gigs and people who hadn't. We had about a 50/50 mixture, just to make sure we weren't getting any kind of confirmation bias. There are always going to be people who grumble about things, but on the whole, the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. People are telling us that it's a really needed service and that it makes them feel valued, held, supported, and equal.
What is your long-term aspiration?
We want it to be normal. We want it to just be another way we consume live music, just like we've got radio, podcasts, television or going to gigs or live-streamed gigs. We want it to just be a normal thing people do when releasing an album and putting a tour together, for example—so, making sure there's an online date as part of that tour. We don't want it to just be a specialist disability thing that the specialist disability people do.
It needs to become embedded on a broader cultural level. So, one of our long-term goals involves getting it in at policy levels. We're looking at trying to connect with the DCMS's loneliness strategy, for example. We're also really keen to get into social prescribing and mental health connections.
It's also a way for grassroots music venues to generate another income stream. We've been talking to the Arts Council and trying to look at a way of getting into their network of venues and in with funders and policymakers. We've been working very much bottom-up so far, but we've got big dreams.
So, what’s the next step for Live to Your Living Room?
One of the next stages of our plan is to go and teach our model to other people and raise awareness of the need for it in an advocacy way. Live streaming is about more than just putting a camera in the corner of the room, so we're looking at ways we can raise awareness of that sector of the audience who, even in access and inclusion conversations, often get neglected because they can't leave the house.
Both my partner, Pete, and I are very reflective workers, so we're constantly debriefing and thinking of what we can do better. We've been doing a lot of work recently on our visual quality, and we're also introducing WhatsApp communities and a Watch Again facility based on feedback from people. Honestly, there's a list as long as my arm of things we want to implement and things we want to try and do. The next steps will be researching and building a solid evidence base from the data we’ve collected over the last four years because we really want to evidence the social impact.
What advice or key learning would you share with other organisations considering delivering similar activities?
A bite-size takeaway would be to keep an open mind and be prepared to recognise that other people will have different experiences than you do.
In terms of a more detailed answer—that's exactly what we're trying to develop at the moment. We're fine-tuning our model to be able to create a resource that we can then take to other organisations and say, 'This is what has worked for us'. We're hoping to develop a kind of consultancy service because we've got the experience on both sides—I've got the event management and Pete's got the tech.
It's important that venues realise that yes, the tech is important but you need to consider the whole event. You need to consider how you want people to feel at your event and the online aspect of your event in the same way you would an in-person gig.
What do you believe the risks are of not addressing EDI within your organisation or sector?
I think we kind of saw it in COVID in how the sector just shut down and panicked. We all experienced what it's like to not be able to leave the house—but hundreds of thousands of people already couldn't leave the house before lockdown and still can't leave the house after lockdown.
Every single one of us is going to be disabled at some point in our lives in some way or another because we all get older. This means that we're all going to face some kind of access barrier eventually. It benefits society when we think about these things and look after everybody.
There'll be people who are feeling loneliness, isolation, depression, mental health struggles, etc., who just don't know that this is an option, that they can do these things online, and that they can access these things. From a purely capitalist point of view, this is a huge audience with massive spending power that people aren't reaching.
Grassroots music venues and festivals are closing down at a rate of knots, but there is a huge spending value of disabled people that they could be tapping into. But first, they need to recognise the value of doing that, and it's going to take a bit of work and thinking differently. Sometimes, it just takes a little bit of empathy to realise that there are people who aren't like you.