Image by Decerry Donato
An Art Show in LA Brings Open Studios to Livestream Shopping
Last week, Los Angeles-based livestream shopping platform NTWRK collaborated with Known Gallery to host a two-day digital art fair. Similar to other livestream shopping, NTWRK only sells exclusive and designer items, some of which can be worth several thousand dollars. Unlike other livestream shopping platforms, NTWRK also stores the livestream video on the app for others to view later.
The lineup was curated by street art veteran Casey Zoltan and directed by mixed media artist Phil Frost and featured an array of L.A.-based artists including OG Slick, husband and wife duo DabsMyla and Joshua Vides. Other artists that were part of the lineup included Andrew Schoultz, Hueman, Askew, Nychos, 13thWitness and Shepard Fairey, creator of the OBEY brand, among others.
Photo by Decerry Donato
In the span of two days, each artist went live on the NTWRK app and showcased their collection and talked about their background. During this time, viewers and fans who were interested in purchasing any of the art pieces would go through a live-bidding process with other buyers.
The auction for each item would last several minutes and some artists also offered a "buy it now" feature for some of their smaller art pieces. The virtual show gave insight into the future of selling art with most of the artists going live in their own art studio. Others like OG Slick, however, got creative and drove around in their car to show viewers the murals they painted.
For the show, Fairey painted four OBEY art pieces that included the infamous icon face created specifically for the event—each of which sold for $5,000. Vides, a much younger artist, had a few hand painted skate decks for sale starting at $1,500 and the items that didn’t sell are still available for purchase on the app.
Similar to WhatNot’s format, viewers that tuned in to any of the artists’ livestreams also had the opportunity to interact and chat with some of their favorite artists in real time. Fans primarily focused their feedback on how excited they were for these collector’s items exclusive to NTWRK and the Known Gallery. Other viewers that tuned in were also chatting and responding to people who were new to the platform and gave them a rundown of how the auction went.
One fan told DabsMyla, “Love you guys so much. Met you at your Technicolor show and it was amazing.”
Since its launch in 2018, NTWRK has also created exclusive content with artists like Takashi Murakami and has collaborated with featured hosts like Billie Eilish, DJ Khaled, Odell Beckham Jr., Blake Griffin, Jonah Hill, Doja Cat and other prominent figures.
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Lehrman's tool, however, ultimately became a music-tech company called Output. Based in L.A.'s Chinatown district, its mission is to help people start making music.
Seven years after it was created, Output has agreed to its first ever fundraise: a $45 million minority-stake investment from Summit Partners.
"I think there will be drastic changes to come in music creation," Lehrman said, "and we want to be at the forefront of it."
His investors agree.
"We believe Output has the potential to reinvent the digital music production market," said Andrew Collins, managing director at Summit and lead investor on the deal. Collins will now join Output's board.
"The holy grail in digital music-making is to make it super easy for musicians to find content that they like and then make it sound unique to them, and that's exactly what Output does," Collins told dot.LA.
The list of artists and projects that have used Output is impressive: Kanye West, Coldplay, Justin Bieber and Rihanna among them, as well as the soundtracks to "Game of Thrones," "Stranger Things" and "Black Panther."
The company broke $1 million in its first year with no advertising, Lehrman said: "just a viral video and a good product." That first product line – which included digital instruments and effects – was software geared toward professional musicians, who purchase it for an upfront fee.
Courtesy of Output
In 2018, the company added a software-as-a-service (SaaS) product, called Arcade, which became particularly popular among musical hobbyists and digital-music newcomers. For a $10 monthly subscription, users receive access to thousands of loops and samples created by Output, which they can then manipulate and turn into their own unique tracks.
Most customers today use Arcade in conjunction with a digital audio workspace like Logic, Ableton or ProTools. Songwriters, whether professional or amateur, can set their rhythm and key, pull from Output's library of sonic building blocks and mold them like musical clay. Users can also upload and work with their own digital audio files.
Over time, Output has seen both its user base and its revenue streams shift away from the pros – which Lehrman said is a customer base with a natural limit – and toward hobbyists and digital-production newcomers.
Arcade, its SaaS product, has seen a 300% increase in monthly recurring revenue over the past 12 months. In just two years, it's grown to generate about 60% of Output's income.
"In the world of SaaS, it is incredibly rare to see both exceptional growth and capital efficiency." Collins said. "You don't see SaaS software growing this fast, profitably, fully bootstrapped. There's not a lot of those out there."
ARCADE by Output - Walkthroughwww.youtube.com
As the popularity of Arcade has grown, Output's user base has shifted to about one-third professional musicians, one-fourth digital-music newcomers, and the rest hobbyists who are "really into making [digital] music."
Collins also likes the market tailwinds that Output is riding — namely, the democratization of music ideation and distribution. Output enables musicians to create new sounds, while platforms like Spotify and Soundcloud allow anyone to publish their tunes with just a few clicks.
The company's technology stack is a combination of digital signal processing (DSP) algorithms written in C++ and some machine learning. "We're going to see that continue to expand," Lehrman said.
Output also has a line of furniture and hardware products designed to help music-makers build out their home studios. It is currently working with Barefoot Sound – which Lehrman called "the Rolls Royce of speakers" – to manufacture a new speaker line.
With its new cash, Output plans to grow its staff, which currently numbers about 60. "We'll grow to north of 100," Lehrman said.
It will also build out its product offering, adding new tools to Arcade like digital instruments and expanding its mobile capabilities.
Output founder Gregg Lehrman has worked under world-famous composers such as Hans Zimmer writing music for film and TV.Courtesy of Output
"We feel strongly we can build a unified ecosystem that once you're in, you're familiar with everything," Lehrman said. "You don't have to learn 100 different applications; it can do 100 different things but you won't feel lost."
Collins pointed to several competitors, including Splice, LANDR, iZotope and Native Instruments, but noted that "nobody else has integrated a very robust curated library of content – sounds, loops, well-organized beats – that musicians can pull from and pull into a workflow engine (the software) and manipulate those sounds to create something that is completely unique."
Lehrman and Collins separately emphasized the Output team's passion for music. 50 of the 60 employees today make music on a daily basis, Lehrman said.
Summit primarily focuses on founder-led bootstrapped companies, which it provides with on-demand services like marketing and engineering.
"Management sets the agenda," Collins said.
For Lehrman, that'll be to further leverage technology: not to create music itself, but to help people create, just like it helped him overcome his own writer's block those years ago.
"From the first product to the last product," he said, "it's been about helping people be creative."
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