Unite people from all over the world with a house concert!

Australia, USA, France, Sweden, United Kingdom – It's incredible that every day, more and more new artists from all over the world sign up with SofaConcerts! We think it’s a perfect time to take a closer look at some of them and present you to some of our favorite international artists. So, let's get inspired by our international musicians today and turn up the volume!

Meadows - Sweden

Meadows is definitely our artist of the week! - Within two weeks he has gone from 500 to 40.000 Facebook fans. We are so proud Meadows! But how did he manage that? After several published singles, the singer-songwriter recently released his first EP, "The Only Boy Awake". The titular song was used beautifully in Netflix's new series, 13 Reasons Why. Wow! In the last few years, the Swede has traveled with his guitar trough Scandinavia, Germany, England and America. He writes songs that start quiet and end in a true sound storm - a mixture of folk and pop. We have already seen him live and are in love! Musically Meadow's is great and he is also a very nice and friendly person who makes your living room concert unforgettable!

Katey Brooks - United Kingdom

"Katey gave us a fantastic performance, she has a fantastic voice and some great songs. Highly recommended!" said Gallagher's Nest, a SofaConcert's host. Katey Brooks is a singer and songwriter from London who writes folksongs with alternative, soul, and blues elements. She grew up in a family of musicians who often traveled, and spent thus time in Bristol, London and Arizona in her youth. You can especially hear this cultural mixture in her unique sound with her self-written, lively lyrics. In the last few years, Katey celebrated some big successes, but she still finds her inspiration for writing on the streets of the world and the people she meets on her travels or concerts. Now, Katey is back in the studio to finish her latest album "We Are The People", which will be released by the end of the year.

My Glorious - Austria

We continue with an indie rock trio from Vienna comprised of Sami Goodenough and the twins Gregor & Paul Saile. My Glorious are the living room concert band par excellence! Think rock in the living room would be unthinkable and way too much noise? Definitely not. Even if they are loud on big stages, they can also delight living-room concerts or garden open-airs with a small unplugged session. Last month the band released their new single "The Dark Idea", always with the aim of meeting open ears touching and inspiring people with their music. One of our hosts, Klavierreich said, "Our barn was rocked by My Glorious with hot, loud, and soft sounds. Everybody in the crowd was swept away by the boys and their music. It was also cool to get some knowledge about the background of the songs. "

Juda Jay - France

How about instead of folk and indie, we send some some hip-hop to your ears! Juda Jay grew up in California and now lives in Paris. He mixes his West Coast influences with different flows and melodies – he creates deep songs that require some thought, but at the same time he writes some wonderful good-mood songs for laughing and enjoying life. Through his music, Juda Jay embodies his version of the American Dream - doing what you believe in, hope and you doin’ it your own way. Juda Jay also let French rap flow into his songs, so he gives the listener an insight into the French culture, too. Very cool!

Ryan Tennis - America

The songs of Ryan Tennis invite you to dream and enjoy. The American has already been around the world many times – he has toured through Switzerland, Argentina, Germany, Australia, Colombia and Ireland – and sweetened many people with his music. He describes his own music as a road trip to a new place with a good friend, so his songs are sometimes heart-warming ballads and other times funky-soul reggae songs. One of our hosts, Jannes Willrodt had this to say about Ryan Tennis, "This Dude rocks! Saw him many times now and organized some gigs for him. Every time a unique show with heart and spirit. You should definitely meet this talented musician cause he´s a fine human being, too! "

Little Strike - America

Next, we come to one of our newcomers, Little Strike - an Israeli musician named Tamar Dart, who moved to Miami with her parents at the age of fifteen because of the political situation in Israel, now she currently calls Philadelphia her home but also was after her study a year in China, Thailand and Nepal. Do you remember Dido? Her voice reminds us of her somehow, but Little Strike makes folk music with electronic elements and lyrics in English, Spanish, Hebrew and French. Now you are exited? Then listen in!

Kaurna Cronin - Australia

As a small child, the Australian Kaurna Cronin was always surrounded by music. The reason - his parents were very much into live music and they traveled often in a Camper with him from festival to festival. As a result, he came in contact with the music genre, which has influenced him to this day: Folk. Cornin's unmistakable sound comes from mixing his soft voice with instruments like his guitar, drums or a harmonica. This mixture has already given the Australian three high-ranking awards and many great performances at festivals or clubs in his hometown of Australia, but also in Europe. Lean back and enjoy his latest song with us!

Shanti Powa - Italy

For the end, we have something upbeat for you! Shanti Powa, one of our newcomer bands, who have recently registered from Italy, is made up of twelve members that make funky hip-hop with influences of reggae and dancehall music. During their music career, they have already performed in many corners of Europe and now they are working on their third album. In the summer, they are also back on tour in England, Germany, Italy and maybe even soon in your living room.

You like the artists? With SofaConcerts, you can invite any of these artists to perform in your own living room or maybe you are going on holiday soon and you will want to make special a living room concert? Here you can see how SofaConcerts actually works and here why it is great to do a living room concert.

If you want to discover more, new international artists - no problem! Then have a look on our website, there is something for you!

5 reasons for hosting a sofa concert

There’s nothing better than exploring new music and sharing it with friends. As a music lover you are always on the search for the next concert and new music trends and bands. Sure, you can look for live gigs at the bar around your corner or maybe you will discover a super cool newcomer busking on the streets (plenty of bands started their career like that), but it is a lot easier to just bring the music right to your living room. This is why you should think about hosting your own SofaConcert:

It’s easy

SofaConcerts are super easy! All you need is a band, your friends and a little space. You just have to send a mail to your favourite band, set a date, invite your friends, have some cold drinks and you are ready to go! Usually the Band play unplugged and doesn’t need a lot of space or special equipment. Therefor you don’t need to worry about the noise either. Just invite your neighbours as well and get to know each other a little better while listening to great music!

Cozy & Intimate

The best thing about house concerts is the cozy and friendly atmosphere. It’s just you, your best friend and your favourite artist. Together you enjoy the music and have a lovely time. You don’t need to squeeze through a big crowd to get to the first row, you can just take a seat on your VIP spot right on your sofa. You can talk to the band and organize your event just like you want it. Take one or two drinks with the band after the gig and listen to their stories. Who needs a backstage pass, when your own living room is the backstage area?

Explore new music

The best benefit about sofa concerts is to easily explore great new music and get to know the artists personally. To discover new artists and share them with your friends is a really special experience. You never know, maybe in five years you are at a sold out show and you are able to tell your friends: “They played in my living room!”

Turn your favourite place into a stage

No need to say, we are all big concert lovers and can’t stop dancing to our favourite band at a big concert, but a private gig has something absolutely special to it. No big crowd that pushes you and spilt beer all over you and especially no super tall guy right in front of you! Just make your home a stage, no matter if it is your living room, attic or garden and put on socks instead of high heels!

 

It’s all about the music

Music builds connections and creates moments like nothing else and that’s the main point about SofaConcerts. Artists share they stories, thoughts and time with you and your friends, which creates a unbelievable connection. No matter how amazing the atmosphere of a big concert hall is, there is nothing like an artist playing his song just for you! This special and magical feeling of a SofaConcert should everyone experience once!

If you think about hosting your own house concert and invite great artists to your home, you should check out our artist. There will be the right one for each event, taste and budget!

Top 5: Our favorite songs for your weekend

The weekend is just around the corner and the sun is shining. To get you into weekend mood we will share our 5 favorite songs for your summer weekend. Get ready for positive vibes and summer feelings!

Tequila & the Sunrise Gang - Seed The Fire

Tequila & the Sunrise Gang

Get out of the grey office, turn the music on and jump right into the weekend. With their multi-instrumental reggae-rock sound, Tequila & the Sunrise Gang gets you in the right mood! The new songs of the album are even more powerful than before and will make you wanna dance. Stop reading and start dancing!

Duncan Woods - Wait

Duncan Woods

He surfs, he skates and enjoys the sunset. Sounds like a dream? Not for Duncan, he follows the sun and always commutes between Australia and Europe. Duncan is a true globetrotter whose songs are a fusion of all the impressions of different people, countries and cultures. He brings the feel-good vibes directly to your home!

Schraubenyeti - Unterwegs

Schraubenyeti

You can barely hold your legs and just want to go outside? Then Schraubenyeti is your perfect companion. His songs are about breaking out of the daily grind and tell you about his adventures. He is often on the go with his rollable piano and shares his original folk songs in parks, on alpine peaks or simply on the streets, spreading positive energy and enthusiasm.

WizTheMc - Vibes

WizTheMc

Heads up! These tunes are contagious! With his smooth vibes, WizTheMc is inspired by US hip-hop, for e.g. by J.Cole, Kendrick Lamar or Childish Gambino. Thus, he brings fresh breeze into the hip-hop landscape of Germany. With his songs, he spreads positive vibes  while at the same time making you think about deeper issues in life. Grab your friends, go out into the green and let yourself be carried away. We love his mixture of soul and hip-hop and look forward to discovering more of his songs!

El Caribefunk - El playaman

El Caribefunk

Summer, sound and sunshine – with the music from El Caribefunk you can start dreaming of your next summer vacation. The exotic mix of salsa, funk and Caribbean music makes you laugh and dance. The band from Colombia has been touring almost non-stop through America for the last 4 years and have already seen a lot of the world. Turn up the music and get ready for the weekend!

You’re feeling inspired, but your next summer holiday is still too far away? We are bringing the summer-vibes right to your! Invite your favorite band for a private live session here:

You just can't get enough? Listen to our all-time-favourit SofaConcerts bands on our Spotify-Playlist right here:

Experience house concert: Grooving in the weekend with SofaConcerts

SofaConcert with Birds of Feather

Friday evening. It's cold, it rains but the weekend is coming. Today we are visiting Jens and his wife, who sent us a few weeks ago, an invitation mail to their SofaConcert with the dear Birds of a Feather. It is time to experience a SofaConcert again and to see what our platform is enable to the people is always exciting, especially when you don't know what awaits you. How are the host, what for guest and how much are invited? Wonderful, that we can be a part of that...so we have followed the invitation and are already full of anticipation what awaits us.

We are greeted nicely and by and by all the other guests also spin in. Although many of the guests don’t know each other, there were from the beginning a cozy and family atmosphere in the air.

quote by Jens, the host

Birds of aFeather, those are Amy and Ryan. A music duo from Switzerland. They sound a bit like Angus and Julia Stone, Passenger or Bryan Adams. Their music is powerful, real, melancholic, reflected and dreamy.

Jens the host, introduces the evening with a very nice sentence: "No matter where we come from and what we make, there’s one thing that connect us - the music." Then he wishes all a great evening. For him and his wife this is not the first SofaConcert which they organize as a host, they have already invited to eight SofaConcerts and they love above all, that it is so individually and nevertheless always a completely different experience.

Then it is already 20:30 and the band begins to play, for most guests it’s the first living room concert and you look in many excited faces. But after the first song it becomes clear that all the daily concerns are blown away and you can fall completely in the voices of the two artists and their music.

Birds of a Feather are two great musicians, their voices harmonize wonderfully with each other, one voice deep and calm, the other powerful and clear as a mountain lake. The exciting thing about this SofaConcert: Jens has invited his friends, acquaintances and colleagues. The mood that the duo creates through their music is really entraining. Whether old or young, whether student or lawyer doesn’t matter, it is simply a harmonious get- together. The wonderful thing is, that the two musicians tell in between what is actually behind the songs and what inspired them to write these songs. E.g. Also: "Life begins at the end of your comfort zone". In this way, they want to encourage the listeners to try out new things, get out of their daily lives, and sometimes jump over their own shadows, because it's worth it. You can really feel the band talking out of the heart of many people from the audience, picking them up there and bringing them to new ideas.

After an hour and a half, the concert is already over and the hat for the hat fee is pass-through. The band does not disappear immediately, they mix with the cheerful audience. This is how a friend of Jens tells us: "It's really great to be a part of something like that once. For me this is also the first living room concert and I am surprised how great this concept works and how close you get to the artists. "
There is even time for a little talk with the artists after the performance. They say that living room concerts are once again something completely different compared to classical concerts. They love the personal mood, that they see how they touch the people with their music and especially the feedback they get after such small concerts. In the faces of the guests you can see enthusiasm and they are also positively surprised by the concept SofaConcerts. Susanne, a friend of Jens: " You come as a stranger, and go as a friend "
Dear Jens, thank you for the invitation and that we could experience your concert. You can’t groove better in the weekend and for many, this is certainly not the last SofaConcert.

to the artist page

Click here: You want to make a SofaConcert but don't know how it works?

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 :)