The Northern Sessions
Feb 2015 - Nov 2018
The Northern Sessions was a live performance video series based in Edmonton, AB. We specialized in creating live sessions, concert videos, EPKs, and more. Over the course of 3 1/2 years we had the pleasure of working with over 90 artists making hundreds of videos.
Founded in 2015 by Nathan Beck, Pablo Herrera, Daelan Wood, and Jordan Beaubien, The Northern Sessions was dedicated to creating professional, meaningful content, and a platform for local musicians to promote their music.
My Role
As Manager and Co-founder for the Northern Sessions, I was focused on the weekly operations of the program, ensuring we had artists, venues, and crew to create our content on a regular basis. In production I participated as a videographer while other team members focused on directing, audio, and producing. Occasionally on smaller sets I would involve myself in all of these facets or sometimes create the entire video on my own.
Post-production was often managed by other members (audio mixing, video cuts, colouring etc.) however sometimes I would handle this as well when needed.
For launching and releasing videos I would work with tools such as Facebook, Vimeo, and YouTube to get content to our viewers.
Product
Inspired by video series in other cities such as, La Blogotheque in Paris and Wood+Wires in Toronto, we set out to create a similar series here in Edmonton.
The goal was to create a platform that featured local musicians, but also incorporated touring musicians to help drive non-local traffic to our series in an attempt to expose local artists to new fans. Prior to the Northern Sessions, we often talked about how we discovered artists watching these other video series and we thought to ourselves: “If we create something like this in Edmonton, maybe our local musicians can be discovered elsewhere”.
Using YouTube and Facebooks recommendation engines and SEO, we were able to validate this experience, with many of our videos being discovered accidentally via search, or through platform users watching other videos similar to the content we created. Furthermore, once we started bringing on touring artists we gained thousands of subscribers from around the world who would go on to discover new musicians based out of Edmonton.
Metrics
Over half a million views across all platforms
4000 subscribers across all platforms
Top video has 100k+ views
90 unique artists
200+ videos and interviews
Key Takeaways
As a founder of an organization I quickly learned how to use techniques from all of my disciplines to manage and grow our content and viewer base.
Developed new skills in social marketing while promoting our videos. Learned how to use Facebook and YouTube ads from a vendors perspective along with the importance of having strong SEO.
Even when you give a product away for free, users have expectations and requirements that need to be met. For us it was both viewers and artists who had needs.
A content platform works a lot like software in the sense that it can be iterated and improved upon to help increase key metrics
What it means to try and raise capital to keep our organization afloat. While we were able to gain some grants and sponsorships, it was never enough to get serious investment and it was not sustainable in the long-run
Working on something I’m passionate about feels better than slogging through a job I don’t have any person connection with. I learned the value of being passionate about the work I’m doing, and to never settle on something just because a pay-cheque is there.