Megan Ihnen: When the Concert Season Is a JPEG Google Can't Read

Megan Ihnen is executive director of the Live Music Project, a Seattle-born 501(c)(3) that calls itself a classical music advocacy and tech-for-good organization and builds all of its software in-house. The origin story is the best part: founder Shia Lyon wanted to hear the Brahms Double Concerto played live, could not find anywhere to look it up, and discovered that Seattle alone had around 30 community orchestras publishing their entire concert season as a JPEG that Google could not read.

In this episode

• How one listener's hunt for a live Brahms Double Concerto turned into a national concert calendar
• Why arts organizations posting seasons as images are invisible to search, and what that costs small ensembles
• "Listener agency" - letting people filter concerts by piece, composer, instrument, price, house-concert vs. hall, or sensory-friendly format
• Spontaneous Free Tickets: turning donated tickets into an audience-development loop, with post-concert surveys fed back to organizations that rarely hear from first-time attendees
• Shipping software on a volunteer dev team - corporate matching hours from Seattle tech employers, coding bootcamp grads getting public-facing portfolio work, and the slower build pace that comes with it
• Running programs manually for years before automating them, and partnering with a university tech-for-good program to build the first version
• Geographic expansion before new art forms, plus a corporate sponsorship model designed not to extract money out of the arts community it serves

"She sees that their concert season is a JPEG on their website and realizes like, Google can't scan this. Google has no idea that this concert is happening, right?" - Megan Ihnen on the problem that started Live Music Project

"But we're using technology to make that easy. Just make it easy to be curious." - Megan Ihnen

"This is a program in which their name can be on every single ticket, every single thank you and really reinforce that community level support." - Megan Ihnen on what corporate sponsors get from Spontaneous Free Tickets

Connect with Megan and the Live Music Project at livemusicproject.org - the concert calendar, Spontaneous Free Tickets, the weekend digest emails and the volunteer sign-ups all live there.