Somebody wanted to hear the Brahms Double Concerto played live and could not find anywhere to look it up. That is the origin of the Live Music Project. Founder Shia Lyon went looking, and discovered that Seattle alone had around thirty community orchestras publishing their entire concert season as a JPEG. Megan Ihnen is now its executive director.
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
This is the whole problem in one sentence, and it is not unique to classical music. Any small organisation that publishes its schedule as a designed image has removed itself from search. The information is on the site. It is just not readable.
For a community orchestra the cost is direct. Someone in the same city is actively looking for the thing you are performing, and there is no path from their search to your hall.
The Live Music Project calls itself a classical music advocacy and tech-for-good organisation. Its answer to the discovery problem is a calendar built around how people actually decide to go to a concert.
But we’re using technology to make that easy. Just make it easy to be curious.
— Megan Ihnen
Organisations donate unsold seats. The project gets them to people who would not otherwise come. Then the part that makes it a programme rather than a giveaway: attendees answer a post-concert survey, and the responses go back to the organisation.
Small ensembles almost never hear from a first-time attendee. This closes that loop, which is why it works as audience development rather than charity.
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
All the software is built in-house. The team is volunteers, drawn from two sources: Seattle tech employers with corporate matching hours, and coding bootcamp graduates who need real public-facing work in a portfolio.
The tradeoff is honest. The build pace is slower. What they get in exchange is a product nobody has to pay for and a pipeline of contributors with a reason to stay.
They ran programmes by hand for years before writing code for them, and partnered with a university tech-for-good programme to build the first version. That order matters. Automating a process you have never run by hand means automating your assumptions.
Two deliberate choices close the episode. Expansion goes geographic before it goes into new art forms, so the model gets tested in another city before it gets stretched into another discipline.
And the corporate sponsorship model is designed not to pull money out of the arts community it serves. A sponsor funds free tickets and gets their name on every one of them, rather than competing with the ensembles for the same donor pool.
| Entity | What it is |
|---|---|
| Megan Ihnen | Executive director of the Live Music Project |
| Shia Lyon | Founder, whose search for a live Brahms Double Concerto started it |
| Live Music Project | Seattle-born 501(c)(3), classical music advocacy and tech for good, all software built in-house |
| Listener agency | Filtering concerts by piece, composer, instrument, price and format |
| Spontaneous Free Tickets | Donated seats plus post-concert surveys, run as audience development |
| The JPEG concert season | Around thirty Seattle community orchestras publishing schedules as unsearchable images |
| Sensory-friendly performances | One of the filters, and a real accessibility gap in classical programming |
Every link above goes somewhere different. These are the ones not already mentioned above.
Everything is at livemusicproject.org: the concert calendar, Spontaneous Free Tickets, the weekend digest emails and the volunteer sign-ups.
Ihnen, Megan. “When the Concert Season Is a JPEG Google Can’t Read.” Unscripted Green & Non-Profits, 2025. https://unscripted-green-non-profits.castos.com/episodes/megan-ihnen-when-the-concert-season-is-a-jpeg-google-cant-read
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