Sofar Sounds, Host of Intimate and Secret Concerts, Returns From Pandemic Bigger Than Ever

variety.com:

Jem Aswad Executive Editor, Music At the beginning of the pandemic, Sofar Sounds — which has made a name and a business for itself by staging “secret gigs and intimate concerts” featuring emerging artists for an invited, engaged audience — seemed to be one of the worst-positioned businesses in the music industry to survive it: many of its shows take place in people’s homes.

Yet not only did they come through the pandemic intact, they hosted multiple livestreams and even says it managed to pay some 3,000 artists whose scheduled shows were canceled due to lockdown, paying out more than $1.5 million to artists over the course of the pandemic.

And after a low-key, year-long ramping up, they’re now hosting more shows than ever. “Obviously, we were hit hard — but artists were really hit hard,” says CEO Jim Lucchese, who joined the company in February of 2019. “We surveyed them and found that over 70% of them lost more than half of money that they were making, and more than 90% lost almost all their all their gigs, obviously, and didn’t get paid.

We had 3,000 artists that that we had to cancel. “So sent them a note and originally said, ‘Here’s the money for your shows, what we typically pay, consider it an advance,’ thinking we’d be back in a few months.