We were just down at the train car doing our weekly "has anything changed" stuff. It hasn't, we still can't get in there.
But, I keep getting a lot of questions today about band shows getting canceled because of people wanting to prevent sickness in public places.
I’ve been getting these questions because my band Lorenzo's Music, we've been live streaming for some time now. We've been doing live events because a lot of our listeners that we have are actually overseas. So we actually do a lot of live streaming events.
I thought I'd just offer up some simple ways to do it and a way to even sell tickets.
We've done it with three camera setups, private groups, we've done it just turning on the camera at practice.
I would say the easiest way to do it is straight from my phone on Facebook. The condenser mic on the camera is perfectly fine.
If you actually wanted to do an event, say you got a show canceled and you wanted to stream live and charge a cover. You can use MailChimp and Square, the app for swiping credit cards and stuff.
You can create an account for free on both MailChimp and Square.
Create a store page on Square (No Squarespace, Square.)and on that store page create an event, like a ticket. For example, do like a $5 live ticket.
So there you have that on a page you can send people to, have people sign up that way. When they pay for the ticket they enter in their email.
Create a private Facebook group. So if you have a Facebook page for your band, up on the top right where it says “like, share” etc. Then there's the “dot dot dot” Click on that and in the drop-down that's there, you'll actually see that there's a create group and you can create a private group for your band.
You can create as many as you want, can create one for every show. Then you can do the live stream directly from the private group.
Take the emails that you get when people buy a ticket and you just add them to the group. That way they've paid admission.
Hell, even in Facebook events you can do a live stream from an event posting. You don't even have to create a Facebook group. Live stream directly from the event post that you created.
Square also connects to MailChimp which no gives you the option to create a landing page that's built into MailChimp which is also free.
So people can sign up with an email and then you can send them a link to a Facebook group.
Of course, there are also more complex ways to stream, you can use OBS software which is like a hardcore broadcast streaming software thing, also free.
You can actually do a three webcam set up, as long as you have like different brand webcams and a USB splitter. It’s possible to switch between the three webcams. My band has done that in the past too. On our YouTube page, we've got two different live streams that we've done using three camera setups.
Anyway, I just wanted to share that just cuz lots of people are asking about it. If you have any more questions or actually if you even have better ways that you've streamed stuff I'd love to hear about it!