GRAMMY Museum President on its new online streaming platforms

The GRAMMY Museum in Los Angeles museum remains closed due COVID-19, but it still hopes to attract music fans from across the globe with a new online streaming service Collection:live. Michael Sticka, GRAMMY Museum President, joins Yahoo Finance’s The First Trade with Alexis Christoforous and Brian Sozzi to discuss.

Video Transcript

BRIAN SOZZI: Bringing the GRAMMY Museum straight to your home, the LA-based museum remains closed due to COVID-19, but it still hopes to attract music fans from across the globe with a new online streaming service called Collection:live.

Michael Sticka joins us now. He's the president of the GRAMMY Museum. Michael, good to see you this morning. So walk us through this. What does it look like, and how much will it cost?

MICHAEL STICKA: Good morning, Brian. Thanks for having me. So Collection:live is a monthly subscription, $2.99 a month. We're adding content multiple times a month, actually. So we started with some of our archives of which there is 3,000 hours of archives over the last decade, plus new programs that we're filming currently.

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: You know, I was actually fortunate to visit your museum last summer with my family. We had a great time, really some interesting great finds and awesome photos on archives there.

But what are you hearing from artists right now, who cannot have live concerts, cannot really interact with their audience the way they normally would? We're going to have Ricky Martin, actually, on in a little bit, on our next show and "On the Move." What are you hearing from artists right now?

MICHAEL STICKA: It's tough out there, you know, especially artists who aren't superstars, who don't have millions of dollars sitting in the bank account. They rely on their tours. They rely on live events. And it's not just the artists. It's the people that work for them. It's the people at venues. It's the people just behind the scenes that you often don't think of, even the caterers, that are really suffering from this.

BRIAN SOZZI: What about the future of concerts? Will they come back, and how will they look differently?

MICHAEL STICKA: I think they're definitely going to come back. And I think once they're able to, they're going to come back in a V-shaped recovery, just because people want to gather. People love music. They love live events. They love to be together and celebrate.

So I do think that they're going to be back. Obviously, it's going to be different, especially in the beginning. I'm sure there's going to be still social distancing requirements, mask requirements, safety protocols across the board. But it'll be back.

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: And I saw on the website, the Grammys are slated for January 31 of the new year. Do you have any idea what that's going to look like yet? Or do you imagine it will be a virtual event?

MICHAEL STICKA: I'm not sure what it's going to look like yet. You know, the Recording Academy produces the Grammy telecast every year. I know that, obviously, everybody's watching what the VMAs are doing, Billboard Music Awards are doing, the CMAs, everybody out there. So I think it's going-- it'll probably look different. It's just a matter of what that is. I think it's still to be determined, actually.

BRIAN SOZZI: Any problems raising funding for the museum?

MICHAEL STICKA: Oh, yeah. So I mean, that's-- just, you know, we have a big brand, and we have this big music brand, but we're still a museum. We're still a non-profit, a C3 organization. The Collection:live subscription is really only going to replace less than 10% of our lost revenue in terms of ticket sales for our programs that we typically have.

Fundraising, of course, has gone to frontline organizations, which it should, if you think about hunger and homelessness and medical needs out there right now, especially with so many people out of work. So museums, arts organizations have continued to suffer. And I don't see any real true rebound right off the bat with that.

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: What's demand been like for the subscription service? Because you're competing with lots of other big names here for people's attention, including Spotify and Apple. I mean, albeit they'll get something different from those services. But what's demand been like?

MICHAEL STICKA: Demand has been good. You know, we don't have a huge marketing budget, so we're not an HBO Max that we can launch and spend millions of dollars telling people about it. We rely on earned media, so me doing interviews, just like this.

Demand has been good, though, from our members, from music lovers, from people that we typically engage with. And what we'll see is that will grow over time, especially when we're able to actually start doing live streams from the theater again.