April 23rd, 2018
 

Dear Friends:

One of the most important aspects of SmallsLIVE has been our live streaming and archiving component.  I remember a lecture back in jazz school taught be the great Phil Schaap.  He told us the story about a club owner in the 1930's in Kansas City who had the idea to put a radio wire in his club and broadcast his shows.  The legendary producer John Hammond, while driving to Chicago, heard the broadcast on his car radio and was so blown away by the music that he turned around and drove straight to Kansas City to see the band for himself.  The band turned out to be Count Basie and the rest, as they say, is history.  This idea inspired me to do the same - broadcast from our club to the world for anyone who wants to listen.

SmallsLIVE started archiving all our shows in 2007 and did our first live stream in 2008.  Since then we have been broadcasting all the sets (and now from Mezzrow as well) to a world-wide audience of jazz fans.  Smalls has 24 bands per week and Mezzrow 21.  Between the two of them we broadcast 180 different bands per month - 2160 groups broadcast per year!  In our archive we now have more than 28,000 recordings and represent nearly 2500 musicians who have performed at our clubs over the last 11 years.  We don't claim to be the first to use this technology but I don't know of any other club or arts institution that can match our record or for how long we've been doing this.  I do know that many clubs and institutions have modeled their live streaming on our system.  SmallsLIVE is a true force for jazz art.

We are just about to mail out royalty checks to our artists.  Our system monitors how much each artist gets played in the course of a pay period.  We divide all the revenue collected from our supporting members (members who pay $10/month) between the artists based on their percentage in relation to the overall archive.  Even though we are still not bringing in a lot of money the payouts are in excess of what an artist can expect from Spotify.  This was our goal - a fair and transparent payout system.

As SmallsLIVE approaches it's 10 year anniversary this fall, we plan to shift to a non-for-profit format.  This will allow folks who want to support us to get a tax break on their pledge.  It will also allow us to focus on our primary goals - jazz education, sponsoring artists for recordings and tours and subsidizing the clubs to insure that future generations will be able to continue to perform there and for fans to enjoy.  Smalls IS an arts institution and a powerful one.  The spirit of this music is strong and of great value to the world.  We plan on continuing to make this available to anyone who seeks it.

Regards,

Spike