Guest: Megan Ihnen, Executive Director, The Live Music Project · Host: Jeremy Rivera
Megan Ihnen runs The Live Music Project, a 501(c)(3) that describes itself as a classical music advocacy and tech-for-good organization — which in practice means it builds its own software in-house to solve a discovery problem the classical music field has never solved for itself. The organization started in Seattle in 2014 and went national, and de facto international, in 2021. This conversation covers how a nonprofit builds real technology on volunteer labor, why they automated a program only after running it manually for years, and what a corporate sponsorship looks like when your guiding principle is not being extractive of the field you serve.
It Started With One Piece of Music
Founder Shia Lyon moved from New York to Seattle and wanted to get involved in the scene as a listener rather than a musician. She wanted to hear the Brahms double concerto played live. Anyone who loves music knows that specific itch — a piece, your favorite players, and the feeling of just wanting to hear it in a room.
What she found was that no such search existed. Googling around surfaced concerts that had already happened, or were happening somewhere else entirely. There was no hub where you could look for a piece, a composer, an instrument, a venue type, or a price you could afford.
Along the way she discovered something else: Seattle alone had roughly thirty community orchestras, on top of the legacy institutions like the Seattle Symphony, the Opera, and Seattle Chamber Music Society. Many were performing free concerts. And in 2014 their season announcements were frequently a JPEG posted to a website — which Google cannot read, which means as far as search is concerned the concert is not happening at all.
Listener Agency
The Live Music Project concert calendar lets listeners filter by the things that actually determine whether they will go: a piece, an instrument, a type of concert, a house concert versus a hall, something free, something sensory friendly in their city. The umbrella is deliberately wide, from ancient early music through contemporary classical.
“We’re using technology to make that easy. Just make it easy to be curious.” — Megan Ihnen
Megan frames the shift as one of posture. Most of the classical field markets from the organization outward — here is our season, come join us, you know we play at a high level, all of which is true. The calendar inverts it and starts from what kind of experience the listener wants to have. LMP calls that honoring listener agency, and it is the organizing idea behind the whole platform.
Spontaneous Free Tickets
The second program came out of being embedded in the community. Ensembles offered Shia free tickets; when she could not attend, she asked whether she could pass them to listeners on the email list. That improvisation became a program.
Members get an email offer and throw their hat in the ring for a specific concert. Winners go, and afterward they fill out a survey that goes back to the presenting organization — which matters more than it sounds, because so few arts organizations ever get structured feedback from a genuinely first-time audience member. It is an audience development tool disguised as a giveaway.
How a Nonprofit Builds Real Software
I asked how they found the technical capacity to pull this off, because the gap between a nonprofit’s intent to reach an audience and its ability to do so is usually where these things die. Megan was clear that their path is specific to them and not universally repeatable: Shia came out of tech product management and landed in a city full of engineers who are encouraged — sometimes with corporate matching dollars from employers like Microsoft or Boeing — to give time to organizations like this one.
From the earliest days LMP has had a volunteer software development team. The tradeoff is honest: building with volunteers is slower than building in a for-profit capacity. The compensating benefit is a workforce development pipeline. They have relationships with coding boot camps and schools, so recent graduates get real-world experience on technology that is live and public-facing, and mentors get a place to give their time. Because it is volunteer-based there is constant turnover in both directions, which means there is always room for someone new.
Run It Manually First, Then Automate It
The most transferable operating lesson in the episode is how they approached automating Spontaneous Free Tickets, which ran as an extremely manual process for years.
“Run all of your programs super manually,” Megan said, “and then turn that into the automated platform.” The manual years proved the model and produced a tech roadmap that already knew every part and piece. They then worked with a tech-for-good program through Stevens University to build the foundation, and handed it to their own dev team to carry forward.
The relaunched version keeps the user experience the same and makes it faster, and — critically — makes national rollout possible so the program matches the calendar’s reach. The two platforms talk to each other on the back end.
Geographic Expansion Before Feature Expansion
Asked whether the mission grows vertically or horizontally, Megan chose geography without hesitation. The goal is to become a household name and a trusted resource across the United States, then beyond. Current focus cities are Seattle, Portland, New York City, the Baltimore–D.C. corridor, and Atlanta, with consistent usage already showing up in Madison, Chicago, Denver, and multiple California cities.
She does see a future where the same technology supports theater and dance — anything with a performance quality where the underlying work matters and people need to know which piece is being performed where. But that is much farther down the path. Being genuinely comprehensive in a handful of cities is what makes the resource trustworthy, and a focused scope is what makes it obvious what someone will find when they arrive.
Sponsorship Without Extraction
I asked about corporate sponsorship because it is the same question I run into with Community Clean Links — how do you engage businesses whose motives are part philanthropy and part visibility?
Their most impactful arrangement so far is a community partnership with King FM, Seattle’s classical station, where LMP has effectively become the calendar infrastructure behind the station’s listings. Megan sees that pattern as replicable nationally: organizations that support live classical music without it being their core mission, and who are already the place people ask where to go hear something.
For the national rollout of Spontaneous Free Tickets, the sponsorship conversation is more direct — a brand’s name can sit on every ticket and every thank you. What governs all of it is a guiding principle she stated plainly: LMP does not seek to be extractive of the community it exists to support. The field is still recovering financially from the pandemic and facing real uncertainty around arts funding. Corporate partnership, done right, brings resources into the field rather than pulling them out.
The Wall That Isn’t There
The values Megan keeps returning to are egalitarian display of information, being a trailhead rather than a gate, and refusing the elitism people associate with the genre.
“The classical music in your community right now is incredibly community focused, is incredibly welcoming. It’s very accessible in so many ways because people have been thinking about it for a long time and putting in the work.” — Megan Ihnen
LMP wants to be the light shining on that work, so that people find their way in instead of assuming there is a wall between them and the hall. And the reason any of this is worth building at all comes down to something she said that has nothing to do with technology.
“Showing up together to hear music in a hall, sitting near your friends and your neighbors, is a very important human activity. It really contributes to community wellness.” — Megan Ihnen
Key Takeaways
- Solve for the listener’s question, not the organization’s calendar — searchability by piece, instrument, venue type, budget and accessibility is what turns curiosity into attendance.
- A season poster saved as a JPEG is invisible to search engines. Structured, text-based event data is the difference between a concert existing and not existing online.
- Run a program manually until you know exactly what it does, then automate it. The manual years are the specification.
- Volunteer engineering is slower, and it buys you a workforce development pipeline — portfolio-grade public work for boot camp graduates, mentorship outlets for senior people.
- Expand geographically before you expand your feature set. Comprehensiveness in a few cities builds the trust that a broader scope would dilute.
- Structure sponsorship so it brings resources into the field instead of extracting them from the organizations you serve.
Connect
Megan Ihnen is the executive director of The Live Music Project (livemusicproject.org), which runs a national classical concert calendar and the Spontaneous Free Tickets program. If you have software development or design skills and want to volunteer on a public-facing civic tech project, she is actively looking — the organization has an ongoing need as volunteers rotate in and out.
From the Unscripted Network
The partnership model Megan describes — brands funding community access rather than extracting from it — is the same idea behind Community Clean Links, which turns real-world community cleanups into shared visibility for local businesses. More nonprofit, green, and community-building conversations are at Unscripted Green & Non-Profits.