We currently run as a not-for-profit experiment under the for-profit startup studio BLDR, but we would love to someday soon spin off SCEEN as an official 501(c)3 to fully align with our values. We're just trying to figure out whether this will all actually work before investing the time, energy, and money needed to start a nonprofit.

Right now there are memberships for individuals and businesses. For individuals, it's just $20 per month - basically the cost of a ticket to a local show. For businesses, it's $100 per month and we'll add you to the site and link to your webpage as a partner business that is committed to supporting local musicians.

In addition to putting more money in the pockets of Artists and supporting Venues, members get free entry to some local shows that haven't sold out by using SCEEN passes that the venues release either ahead of time or the night-of.

Members receive a weekly email about which shows you can get into with your SCEEN membership. You can also check the events calendar anytime for currently available passes. Members can check into every show in the platform as a vote to get the performing artists part of that month's payout, but only some of those shows will available free passes available to members.

See the current list of Artists and Venues who have partnered with SCEEN on past or future shows by logging in and clicking the tabs for Artists and Venues.

Venues, artists, and paying supporters can all add shows to the calendar. It takes about 2 minutes to add a new show and link Artists. Check out this tutorial video for a full walkthrough

It's free! All you have to do is create your artist account or claim an existing one, add your bank info or debit card securely through Stripe, and you're in.

Everything works on a basic points system to try to keep things fair. In short, the more time you play to more checked-in supporters, the more you get of the pot.

Here's an example: let's say there is a 3 band lineup - the two openers play for 30 minutes and the headliner plays for 60 minutes. Now let's say it's a big ticketed show and 500 people show up, and 100 of those people are SCEEN supporters and they check in. That would mean the two openers get 300 points (30 minutes x 100 check-ins) and the headliner would get 600 points.

At the end of the month, we add up all the points for all the artists and to see what percentage of the pot they get. In this example, if that was the only show that month and the pot had $1,000 in it, then the band with 600 points would get $500 and the other two would get $250.

SCEEN was born out of years of working on different ways to help artists actually make a living rather than have a really expensive hobby. The big issue is that money has bleeding out of the music industry for decades, and instead of trying to charge more for things that are already basically free, we thought we try to giving local communities a way to put money in the pockets of artists purely because they believe music is an important part of our lives.

For now, we take 20% of the pot each month to try to cover costs. The numbers you see that are paid to artists are actually what they get. We don't really know how much it will cost to cover all the transaction fees and maintenance costs, but the goal is to get 20% to be smaller. We'd also love to become a nonprofit in the future so that fee can be even smaller or non existent, but that's a headache we're not ready for quite yet (unless someone wants to help).

Because it's a pretty terrible idea for a really profitable business and really hard to get 3 different groups of people to work together in a new way. But because it's becoming easier and cheaper to try new tech-enabled ideas, we thought we'd give it a shot and see what happened.

To log in, just click Log In from the sceen.co homepage and enter your email to receive a secure code. No password needed!