Case Study

Ragas Live Festival

In March of 2020 the world closed its doors. 

As all the venues in New York were shuttered, our team was challenged to figure out how to transform a live festival to a virtual event.

This case study covers how we used design thinking to

  • create a virtual platform

  • earn significant revenue via donations

  • streamline the production process

  • keep quality high

  • achieve worldwide attention and participation

  • provide users with a sense of community during a time of isolation

Through research, creative thinking, and an empathetic, user-centered approach, the results exceeded anything we could have dreamed of. 

The Team

  • David Ellenbogen - Executive Producer, Digital Lead

  • Mari Tanaka - Associate Producer, Lead UX designer

  • Nim Barshad - Developer

  • Jesse Johanning - Visual Designer, animations and logos

  • Adrien Tillman - Artistic Director, videographer

Time: 6 months

Budget: We started with $5,000 but in the end raised around $106,500 including ticket sales, merch, sponsorships, grants and in-kind contributions.

Background

This was not our first major transition.

The festival began in 2012 as a radio broadcast where a community of 50 musicians performed in-studio over a period of 24 hours. In 2017 we figured out how expand that broadcast into a live, ticketed event at the Rubin Museum of Art.

Now in 2020, with the pandemic at it’s height, we had the opposite challenge.

Is it possible to create a relevant music festival, even if the musicians and audience can not leave their doors?

Research

In the lead-up to making our plans, our team produced small weekly online livestream events and attended and produced other less ambitious livestreams. Through our research, we had data from 22 online events before we made our decisions.

we learned:

  • donations are significantly lower when they are anonymous

  • all livestreams we saw (in early 2020) were of poor quality

We then conducted a feature analysis of existing platforms and realized they all had their shortcomings.

 

Defining the Problem 

We mapped out our challenges:

“Without ticket sales how might we pay for talent?”

“How might we create an at-home experience that is as exciting as an in-person experience?”

“How might we get the largest audience possible, without giving everything away for free?”

“How can we possibly keep quality high when streaming audio and video experiences are notoriously bad quality”

 We also thought about what the unique opportunities were for creating a virtual event.

  1. Our potential audience had no limit.

  2. We were not geographically constrained.

  3. Artists who would normally be beyond our reach may consider working with us.

  4. There was a great opportunity for partnerships.

  • Problem #1

    How will we get people to watch, and make it exciting?

  • Solution #1

    We will get well-known artists, film in stunning locations.

  • Problem #2

    How will we pay for all this?

  • Solution #2

    a) We will build our own streaming/ e-commerce platform to encourage donations

    b) We will build a lot of partnerships to raise money and share the expenses

  • Problem #3

    How do we keep quality high?

  • Solution #3

    We will keep the quality high by doing extensive post-production and giving the event a “live” feel.

  • Problem #4

    How will we give our viewers a sense they are not alone?

  • Solution #4

    a) Our platform will have an active chat function to create a sense of community.

    b) By incorporating video from the villages and cities this will be filmed, and the audience will have they are sharing a journey.

Problem#1: We need money to get started

Solution: Get partners to invest


Once we had a clear vision of a 24 hour event that would stream from various countries all over the world with legendary artists, we pitched the idea to partners and integrated grants and projects that were already in the works.  

We got financial support from the Rubin Museum of Art, Brooklyn Arts Council, Pioneer Works, Brooklyn Raga Massive, Cafe Royal Cultural Society and used grants for projects from the New York State Council of the Arts and others.  

Problem#2: How will we get people to watch?

Solution: Starpower!

To solve the problem of getting people to watch we reached out to the biggest names in the genres we loved. These were our musical heroes, Grammy Award winner Zakir Hussain in San Francisco, Grammy winner Toumani Diabate in Mali, and the founder of minimalist music, composer Terry Riley in Japan. We reached out to Betsayda Machado in Venezuela and aimed to get the legendary Rajasthani folk singers to perform in the Mehrangarh Fort in Rajasthan.

Thanks to our idealistic, clear vision, to our surprise everyone said “yes!”

Grammy Award winner Zakir Hussain at Ragas Live Festival 2020, live from SF Jazz

Problem#3: Dealing with this much data will be overwhelming for our team

Solution: Make the process as efficient as possible

Hooray? Not really!

Now we have to produce 24 movies!

Amazing talent kept signing on, eventually reaching 90 musicians in 15 cities in 7 countries. We needed a plan to deal with all this data and a way to keep the quality high.

We designed a data flow, shown below, and noticed some room for improved efficiencies.

Problem#4: Most livestreams have low quality

Solution: Post-produce everything in house, pre-record everything but give a live feel.

A major element of our service blueprint was that we kept all post-production in-house. This would allow us to raise and control the quality of all the audio and video that the artists sent us. The image below was from a video that was poorly shot and had a bad color balance between the various cameras. We used intense post-production including digital pans and zooms, an occasional mirror effect, and a black and white palette to create compelling visuals.

Designing

Now that we had a process in place for creating the content, we needed to figure out what our platform would look like. We knew the functionality must include

  1. Ability to livestream 24 hours

  2. A chat function to create a sense of community

  3. Visible donations (to encourage generosity)

  4. Ability to integrate into our existing website

  5. Sales of merchandise

  6. An option to join our e-mail list on sign in.

  7. Affordances to watch the video full screen without distraction

We also knew we had limited time and budget…

Sketches

In our initial sketches we struggled with finding the best place for a call to action.

We made our decisions to prioritize donations, eventually placing the names of donors just below the livestream and featuring the “donate” button prominently on all pages.

 
 

User Flow

We developed a user flow in which users would be asked to donate when they signed in/registered and would also have the option to donate when they watched.

This flow ended up being vital. We would later find out that many users ended up donating twice and the donations before the event amounted to 1/3 of the total.

This design also gave users the option to join our mailing list which added over 1500 addresses to our list.

Iterations

In our initial sketches, we struggled with finding the best place to emphasize the call to action. To decrease cognitive load we stuck with a single button to the right of the text,

In the sketch below (a screen before login) we addressed user confusion at the “Livestream” button which had been intended to be for people who already registered.

The Launch

All this led to our final product which launched live on November 21st 2020:

As seen on the left, the top nav bar was simple and the donations and chat below were dynamic, creating a sense of community and letting the users know they were sharing the experience.

All of the functionality including the merch and artist information were on one long scrollable page. This allowed users to scan through all the information without stopping the music.

The donation and merch pages were clean and simple and the users had the ability to expand the video for a fully immersive experience.

We chose to show interstitial videos of the locations, Madagscar, Japan, Mysore, Venezuela, Rajasthan, W. Bengal and beyond to give viewers the feeling they were on a journey.

 Results

The results were beyond anything we could have hoped for.

After months of planning and preparation we launched at 9PM on November 21st. Within minutes we had 2500 people tuned in and the first donations were coming in. The steady stream of donations did not stop for 24 hours.

In the end we received over $30K from 4000 registered viewers. and made another $5,000 in revenue on Merchandise. About 1/3 of our viewers on our platform donated and the average donation was $28.00. We were able to pay out over $25,000 to artists at a time when there were no performance opportunities. We decided to share a few hours of the stream during the event on social media and gained another 86,000 viewers along with tens of thousands of listeners to the FM simulcast in New York City.

We received over 1 million impacts in traditional press in 50 + outlets across North and South America, Europe and India. This included extensive coverage in NPR, The New York Times and PBS, which licensed our first set for their “Great Performances” series.

 Most importantly the event had a profound emotional impact on people.

5 months later, actor Jason Manzoukas reflected on his experience in the New York Times:

“Did you watch “Ragas Live,” by any chance? You can sign up and watch the whole thing: 24 hours of uninterrupted, absolutely incredible music performances. They had Zakir Hussain, Terry Riley, all these names. They’re all playing from home, so they’re like, “Here’s Terry Riley from Japan!” They went to Venezuela and played this band I’ve never heard of, fronted by this woman named Betsayda Machado. Do you know who this is? I’m going to send you a song. The visual of them out in this beautiful, idyllic, lush green setting, with the river behind them and people going by and boats, and they’re singing and playing this — I was, like, mouth agape. I stood up, I got so excited.”

He was not alone, we got many messages from different countries that this event was a highlight of that very challenging year. We also had the honor with connecting with many incredible artists and introducing people, like Jason, to profound music they had never seen before.

 Arigato. ありがとう。