Kudos to Shawn Gee, the president of Live Nation Urban who not only runs Maverick, managing clients like the Roots and Jill Scott but now he has a new venture with Twitch called BlackStream Live. This is a network that will have concerts, podcasts, conversations and jam sessions from Black creatives. The service will premiere on Feb. 26. He stated:
“BlackStream Live started as a kernel of an idea during the early days of the Pandemic as my business partners—Ahmir ‘Questlove’ Thompson and Tarik Trotter of The Roots—and I were building and delivering content across a variety of digital platforms,” He went on to say… “We quickly realized the importance of what we called the new streaming economy and saw the infectious engagement behavior of the audience. However, the two issues we constantly faced were monetization and ownership. We needed to find the proper method to fund and monetize our ideas in order to be able to scale, turn a profit, and maintain an equity stake in the creative IP we were incubating. My partnership with Twitch allows us to support black creators up front with capital and ultimately partner with them in the ownership of the ideas. As the IP scales, all parties benefit.”
