Concert Window

As employee number five I embedded myself in the community rather than studying it from outside — talking with musicians around the world, watching shows, speaking with fans and paying attention to how people actually behaved around live music.

What kept surfacing had nothing to do with video quality. A local scene isn’t a set of independent performers who happen to play the same town. It’s a web of people who lend each other audiences.

That reframed the strategy. The platform had been asking isolated artists to broadcast into a space with no audience in it and no reason for anyone to be there at a particular moment. Scenes don’t work that way.

So I curated regional and genre festivals: several artists from a community already connected offline, playing across one specific weekend, each promoting to the audience they already had.

The iPhone app raised a question that wasn’t really about features. Playing to a camera in your kitchen is a different act from playing a venue, and musicians had no name for it — so the product had to explain itself before anyone would try it.

I named it BUSK. A busker doesn’t need a stage or a booking. They pick a spot and play, and the audience is whoever happens to be passing. The phone made almost exactly that possible, so I borrowed the word the culture already had for it.