MA Top 30 Professional: Megan Ihnen

Executive Director
Live Music Project

Megan Ihnen landed at Live Music Project (LMP)—a massive, multi-city concert calendar searchable by composer, work, instrument, or performer, among other filters—thanks to Twitter. Worn down from juggling her teaching and performing careers, the mezzo-soprano posted in 2018 that she was looking for a new, remote-friendly role. Shaya Lyon, who founded and coded LMP, messaged Ihnen that she was transitioning out of her executive role. Before long, Ihnen was assisting LMP with marketing, communications, and development on a contract basis before succeeding Lyon fulltime in 2021.

Under her leadership, LMP expanded from its home base of Seattle to six focus cities—places where LMP itself maintains a comprehensive concert calendar, though anyone, in any city, can submit a concert for inclusion. Coming out of the pandemic, Ihnen further developed LMP’s commitment to access, including search filters for concerts that are free, live-streamed, and sensory-friendly. Further tags include women composers, composers of color, or concerts that focus on LGBTQ+ themes—though she stresses that these distinctions are always self-identified by the composers or organizers themselves, rather than assumed by LMP.

“Those tags help surface information that we know that our users are looking for. They want to hear music by composers that reflect their background, and we try to do that as clearly and compassionately as possible,” Ihnen says.

Most crucially of all, Ihnen also expanded LMP’s Spontaneous Free Tickets program, which has, to date, given away more than $180,000 in tickets. After being gifted industry comps for years, LMP began working with organizations to give away a cache of unsold tickets, lottery-style, to prospective concertgoers. LMP’s data indicate that 65 percent of Spontaneous Free Ticket recipients are first-time audiences to the events they attended—“unheard of in classical music,” Ihnen says. LMP then acts as a neutral intermediary to survey the ticket recipient postperformance, passing along that feedback to the presenter.

“I have a personal attachment to that part, because having worked in arts organizations for so long, I know donors who feel really comfortable providing their feedback,” she says. “But how often are you actually going to hear from firsttime attendees to find out what their experience was like?”