The Open Stage Berlin

Picture South African indie songstress Alice Phoebe Lou singing of love and sorrow in an old empty brewery. Elsewhere, an abandoned swimming pool in Neukölln resonates with the percussive sound of Israeli musician Ben Dagovitsch. On Tempelhofer Feld, Berlin locals Ohrbooten can be found beating away the rainclouds with their drums. It is images such as these through which THE OPEN STAGE BERLIN documents Berlin’s thriving music scene. The aim: to capture the spirit of the people and the places that embody the soundtrack of our city, to promote musicians, and to provide a platform that showcases great Berlin music – all free of charge.

Since February 2014 a team of 14 people from 9 different nations have been working together to make this project possible. To date, there are over 60 videos featuring artists from all over the world playing all genres of music - in peddle-boats, greenhouses, photo booths, and old swimming pools. Every week, 3 to 4 new videos are produced. The website is free to use, and without registration or advertisements. In order for it to remain this way, The Open Stage Berlin needs your support!

Through The Open Stage Berlin, we want to reach all music lovers and provide our users with an online video-chronicle of Berlin’s music scene today, which can be enjoyed by the people of the future. We support up-and-coming artists and street-musicians by providing them with high-quality, cost-free music videos. The site is an online platform that provides users with new musical inspiration. Through the website, users can discover unique and exciting musicians and locations that define our city today. We choose diverse shooting locations that really capture the magic of Berlin. This is how we endeavor to capture the true soundtrack of the city.

We are working without sponsors, without external funding and purely through volunteers – we are independent and unrestricted. The momentum is unbelievable – every week we receive over 10 new enquiries from bands and artists who want to get involved with the project. In order to respond to all these requests we need more manpower, technical equipment, and funding. We want to make our chronicle of Berlin’s music scene accessible to everybody and we don’t want to require that our users go through registration and payment procedures. This is why we need your support. Help us to allow this music chronicle to survive, develop and thrive. Help our team to stay independent and advertisement-free, and allow us to keep supporting local musicians. We believe that every musician and artist should have the opportunity to be seen and heard.

With your support, we can fill The Open Stage Berlin with the music that provides the soundtrack to our city. With your help, we can provide better videos for the musicians and users by replacing our old cameras with brand new technical equipment. We will be able to design a new webpage – in the future you will be able to create playlists, discover the locations of our shoots through an interactive map, and filter the artists through genres and favourites.
Using Berlin as our "stage" to document new and exciting music is just the beginning – in the coming years, we hope to bring our concept to many more cities around the world, and to capture their soundtracks.
We are not working for profit and we don’t keep any of the money for ourselves. This is the reason we need you to support us through this crowdfunding campaign. We want to fullfil our dream of creating a chronicle of Berlin’s music scene. Just a small donation would help us to continue to capture the soundtrack of the city, on peddle-boats, in breweries, and on Tempelhofer Feld. We love what we do, and we would love to keep doing it with your support.

If you have any comments, questions or queries, please don’t hesitate to contact us:
[email protected]