Retrospect 2016

The year has only just begun, and a new one is already about to start… we can hardly believe it! It was an incredibly exciting year for us with so many things going on - maybe you only met us this year. We are so happy that you are a part of our ventures!

Instead of stumbling directly into the new year, we would like to remember the last one once again for you. Unbelievable what can happen in a year ...

Hurray, the time has come: we took our laptops, our dear lamp and the guitar and moved

into our first own office. Many thanks to the Social Impact Lab in Hamburg, it was a wonderful time with you! But our new, small but fine office is comfortably furnished and we are right in the middle between great neighbors like Viva con Agua, Wandnotiz, the wonderful Mitra and many other lovely people. If you are in Hamburg, just come over for a visit – the Knust, a club where many of our artists play, is directly over the way.

And our creative vein was also quite active:

Time don’t take you back, it’s only moving on…

We started our year with a very emotional video shoot: It is a Wednesday morning. We have chosen the best day for our experiment, as Hamburg shows itself from its typical side: It is cold, rainy and gray. If that will work? With our floor lamp, the band Nature in the City and a mysterious envelope in the hand, we are on our way to the city. Our goal: unsuspecting passers-by, who we want to take out from their routine.

“Good Morning, do you a have moment of time for us? It’s about a little experiment.”

Our team member Johanna walks straight to the first passer-by and pulls out a brown envelope. The initial skepticism of our first volunteer changes to curiosity. Would you give an envelope to anyone around here - without knowing what it is all about?

The envelope moves from one curious face to the another. From one stranger to the next. When the envelope has been opened and an expiring hourglass and a small card with the inscription “MAKE EVERY MOMENT COUNT ... YOU WILL NEVER GET IT BACK” comes to surface. At the same time the band Nature in the City sneaks up from behind ... Well, you can see here what happened next.

A little spoiler in advance ;) It was an emotional day for u s- it is incredible to see how a small gesture can effectuate something that great.

Well, for sure this wasn’t our only surprise idea this year!

                                                                                                        Sofa Surprise in the City

In the late summer months, we planned our biggest campaign this year. The result has been seen in total more than 15 million times: from the Brazilian news station, over a dozen newspapers in Germany to Jérome Boateng, all of them have shared the Unity video. So this is what is called virality J One million views in less than 24 hours - we sat in our office with open mouths & in the coming weeks we were happy to welcome countless new SofaConcerts fans. The idea was imitated in the following months by some people, over France, England, to Canada ... But see for yourself!

Bosse & SofaConcerts join forces

And because we loved all the reactions so much, there was another nice surprise in November. This time with prominent support from the German chart-breaker BOSSE. His album ‘Engtanz’, was at number one hit in the German music charts shortly after the release and we have always liked him a lot. Why? Because he is simply authentic, spontaneous and above all creative. A perfect fit for us, we thought, - and had a lot of fun together!

At this point, again many thanks to Aki Bosse! It was a such a plearue to work with you - we still have a big smile on our faces when we think of the day and we are sure the concert host Conny feels the same ...

Beneath our creative work, we did work a lot to make our platform grow internationally.
Now there are hosts and artists from 16 countries on SofaConcerts.org. Isn’t this crazy? Even artists from New Zealand, Australia, Vietnam, USA are present. The stages are also becoming more and more creative: From the classic living room, to holiday houses in France and Canada, to barns in the countryside, to an olive garden in Greece: Our vision ‘Every place can be a stage!’ is coming true more and more!

However, what motivates us most are the small and the big stories of the moments that take place at the concerts. Yes, SofaConcerts are emotional. They are about engagements, surprise concerts, new friendships. There is always a story behind the concert and some of your messages have moved us to tears. Thanks for that!

And soon, 2016 passed by. So many things happened and even more will happen in the next. There’s still a lot of music lovers who have never experienced a SofaConcert yet. We want to change this, together with your help!

Thanks a lot to you all of you guys! We wish you a good start and a happy, exciting year 2017: Full of beautiful moments with your friends and loved ones, and, of course, with great live music! We are looking forward to it! 

Here you can find a short overview of our year in pictures :)