A few concrete mechanisms that made this work (happy to expand):
* “Host layer”: greeting newcomers + making it safe to arrive alone mattered more than we expected.
* Curation as governance: coherent music changes how people behave in the room.
* Offline outreach outperformed posting: visiting local businesses in person built trust faster than Instagram.
* Scale changes the social physics; we stayed small on purpose.
Curious if anyone here has built local repeatable formats (meetups, reading groups, hackerspaces), what made them stick?
> early on we needed Instagram content that could show music visually without filming crowds in a club. We started filming headphone-walk clips: one person, headphones on, walking through town to a track we chose.
Brilliant. Fantastic example of constraints producing richly creative results.
Thanks. The idea came from trying to visualise “listening to music” in a way that actually works on social media without filming crowds inside a club. The constraint forced a better format.
A few years ago, I started again to attend regularly to concerts, and often in small / mid size local rooms, with an audience from perhaps 50 to a few hundred people.
Those are much more meaningful to me than those giant stadiums where you watch the band on giant screens. These thoughts will seem obvious, but smaller spaces with a limited audience are really warmer. You feel much closer to the artists, you are sharing emotions, sometimes the artist comes playing or singing in the middle of the audience. Things happen! A guitar string breaks, a drum falls, the singer goes out of tune. This is real live music!
We do agree with this, we both prefer attending small gigs ourselves for that exact reason. Also, all bands has to start somewhere, it takes many small gigs to create an audience and develop their craft. Writing and producing songs is one thing but there is no substitution to the experience to see what moves in people listening live. The majority big stadium bands started with endless small non paying gigs, this is the foundation of the music business.
Haha, almost, we add an extra word and some signifiers.
"Vi ses i röken och dimman! "
It actually means something specific. We tend to use a smoke machine a lot on our nights, one time the police showed up because they thought the place was on fire. The symbols at the end signifies the electricity of nights and the headphones is of course a reference to our social media headphone walks.
This is fixed catchphrase we use in all our communications.
As the other poster commented Kolibri is hummingbird in Swedish. The name was inspired by 2 things. A feeling of lightness and ease connected with carefree summer nights and also the intros of all versions of pacific by 808 state.
Totally fair. It’s a real monthly music night, not software.
The Show HN part is the site + media (so people can see the scale/atmosphere), and the thing we’re trying to share is the operating model: how you get strangers to show up alone, feel safe, and come back, without big budgets.
Strong spring lineup. Tonight is Hidden Lines, end of Feb Sydney Valette (Paris), and 20 March Liminal Project (UK) + Yugoslavia (ES) with Inåt Bakåt Records. On 11 April there’s a one-day festival in Norrköping (Kallsup, Poloklubben, Zack Zack Zack, etc.).
We’ve been experimenting a bit with how much we pre-announce (small room, and we don’t want to spread people too thin), but the schedule on the site is the best place to check. Instagram is our main outreach: @kolibrinkpg
Kul att höra från dig! Det är många olika personer runt Kolibri som känner dig från Berlin som t.ex. Henrik Maneuever så det var extra kul när du besökte oss.
Not against AI, but I think you would find this post to be better if you didn't use AI to write it. They are not quite at the point yet where they generate something interesting enough for most people to want to read. Additionally, it goes somewhat counter to your stated goals. You (or chatgpt) said:
> People return when they feel recognised and when the night has a consistent identity.
But there's no identity to your post, because it doesn't feel like it was written by a person. Try writing it yourself! It’s boring, but it builds trust because it’s human, not algorithmic.
Anyway, congrats! I used to be a little bit into the DIY music scene in Chicago. Super cool to see other manifestations of it around the world
I don't think it's AI, they're just Swedes, we talk in a kind of boring way I suppose, and directly translating it into English usually makes it read kind of "stiff". I don't get the same feeling as you, but might be I'm just used to it.
OP here (Maria & Jonatan). This took off while we were asleep.
Maria is the creative force and writes Swedish very well. We used ChatGPT as a bouncing board to translate/tighten the English and get the story across. The piece reflects what we do, but in hindsight it probably ended up a bit over-polished.
> What we built isn’t an app. It’s a repeatable local format: a standing night where strangers become regulars, centred on music rather than networking.
Brilliant. Fantastic example of constraints producing richly creative results.
Those are much more meaningful to me than those giant stadiums where you watch the band on giant screens. These thoughts will seem obvious, but smaller spaces with a limited audience are really warmer. You feel much closer to the artists, you are sharing emotions, sometimes the artist comes playing or singing in the middle of the audience. Things happen! A guitar string breaks, a drum falls, the singer goes out of tune. This is real live music!
https://sydneyvalette.bandcamp.com/ https://coppia.bandcamp.com/
Aha, I recognise this as a direct translation of what I used to see DJs and club promoters writing in GBG and Sthlm — ses i dimman!
"Vi ses i röken och dimman! "
It actually means something specific. We tend to use a smoke machine a lot on our nights, one time the police showed up because they thought the place was on fire. The symbols at the end signifies the electricity of nights and the headphones is of course a reference to our social media headphone walks.
This is fixed catchphrase we use in all our communications.
Best of luck going forward.
The Show HN part is the site + media (so people can see the scale/atmosphere), and the thing we’re trying to share is the operating model: how you get strangers to show up alone, feel safe, and come back, without big budgets.
Strong spring lineup. Tonight is Hidden Lines, end of Feb Sydney Valette (Paris), and 20 March Liminal Project (UK) + Yugoslavia (ES) with Inåt Bakåt Records. On 11 April there’s a one-day festival in Norrköping (Kallsup, Poloklubben, Zack Zack Zack, etc.).
We’ve been experimenting a bit with how much we pre-announce (small room, and we don’t want to spread people too thin), but the schedule on the site is the best place to check. Instagram is our main outreach: @kolibrinkpg
> People return when they feel recognised and when the night has a consistent identity.
But there's no identity to your post, because it doesn't feel like it was written by a person. Try writing it yourself! It’s boring, but it builds trust because it’s human, not algorithmic.
Anyway, congrats! I used to be a little bit into the DIY music scene in Chicago. Super cool to see other manifestations of it around the world
Maria is the creative force and writes Swedish very well. We used ChatGPT as a bouncing board to translate/tighten the English and get the story across. The piece reflects what we do, but in hindsight it probably ended up a bit over-polished.
Happy to answer questions.
The paragraph when I stopped reading:
> What we built isn’t an app. It’s a repeatable local format: a standing night where strangers become regulars, centred on music rather than networking.