Now that all concerts and festivals are temporarily banned or cancelled due to the Corona virus, the website Ask-a-song.com offers bands and artists an alternative.
The misery surrounding the corona virus also hits artists hard. They lose a large part of their income because of cancelled concerts. The website Ask-a-song.com offers bands and artists an alternative. From their studio, rehearsal room or stage they can play songs requested by the audience via a live stream. That audience can choose to pay a small, voluntary contribution to the artists. In this way they can earn a little extra money during the Corona crisis and fans and music lovers are offered an online live concert.
You ask, we play
Ask-a-song works both ways. Bands and artists can create a playlist on the platform with the songs they play. Visitors can then graze through the playlists and request their favorite songs. By linking to Spotify, they can first listen to part of the original. The audience can also read the lyrics and sing along if necessary. Those who request a song can indicate for whom or which special occasion it is, then choose whether they want to make a donation and if so how much. That money is paid via the artist’s Mollie account. If there is a match, the band plays the song live via the Ask-a-song page or the channels like Facebook, YouTube or Vimeo.
Free platform for artists
The platform is free and can be used by hundreds of thousands of bands and artists worldwide. Both by professionals, semi-professionals and amateur musicians. In fact, bands ask their fans: say what you want us to play. Then they get a kind of private performance and support their favourite band or artist’, explains Wim Zech of Ask-a-song.
Zech developed the platform a while ago for his own band. ‘The idea was to build an application with which the audience can request songs from a list during performances. With the Coronavirus everything came to a standstill and the musicians also came to sit at home. That’s why we’ve expanded Ask-a-song to a platform where bands and artists can link their livestream and still perform in front of their audience’, he says.