The first time Moses Sumney, a rising young musician, played a Sofar Sounds show, the greenroom was someone’s bedroom. There was no bar, only tap water from the kitchen, and no stage. Audience members sat on the hardwood floor and ate takeout or sipped deli beers. When Mr. Sumney performed an encore with Karen O, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs frontwoman, they first had to wait for the lights and noisy ventilation system to be turned down. Then they quietly sang her “Moon Song” to the glow of a few dozen raised iPhone screens.
“I loved it,” said Mr. Sumney, a singer-songwriter and guitarist from Los Angeles who has performed with a Who’s Who of indie rockers, including Beck and David Longstreth of Dirty Projectors. “I think that was my favorite kind of show, where everyone’s just sitting on the floor like they’re around a campfire.”
Mr. Sumney, 24, is one of many musicians who praise the setup of Sofar Sounds, a five-year-old company that puts on concerts in people’s homes. On Tuesday he will perform at its first official showcase as part of the CMJ Music Marathon, the annual five-day festival that runs through Saturday in New York City. In keeping with Sofar tradition, the exact address of the venue — a downtown loft — will be revealed only to registered attendees, and even then only at the last minute. The full lineup is also kept secret, something of a stretch for a festival that is based on building attention for buzz bands.
But for both CMJ and Sofar, the partnership helps promote a sense of artist-audience intimacy, and the cool cred that builds fandom, and perhaps revenue, in a stratified digital music sphere.
“It’s a discovery thing,” said Matt McDonald, the showcase director for CMJ. With over 1,300 artists from around the world gigging in clubs and bars in Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, CMJ is a mad feat of scheduling, queuing, and ticket or badge shuffling. For concertgoers weaned on DIY musical moments, a Sofar living room show brings back “those first experiences at things that are a little more improvised,” Mr. McDonald said.
For Sofar (the name is an acronym for “songs from a room”), the CMJ festival was a chance to book new out-of-town acts and invest in their careers. “CMJ is a global event, and we’re a global organization,” said Rafe Offer, a co-founder. “If we discover a band in New York coming in from Norway, then we can have them on in Norway.”
Since he and a friend started Sofar in London on 2009, it has grown to outposts in 95 cities across the globe, adding a new locale at the rate of one a month, Mr. Offer said, from Cairo to Costa Rica. Despite that scale, the company has only six employees, and is still largely volunteer run. Hosts cede their homes in exchange for the cachet of having on-the-verge artists like Jesca Hoop play next to the coffee table. Guests sign up online and tickets are free. To compensate musicians, organizers pass the hat, or provide a polished video of the performance. Though far from profitable now, the company has attracted angel investors, who believe its grass-roots model and growing fan base may amount to a new musical platform in the future.
“It’s secret, and you always have good surprises,” said Giovanna Matero, 28, a Sofar regular who came to the Karen O show, at an app developer’s sleek TriBeCa apartment. Sometimes the surprise is just the real estate. The founders of the Fishs Eddy boutique, Julie Gaines and David Lenovitz, have twice hosted shows in their top-floor Battery Park duplex apartment with sweeping views of the Hudson. The crowd, Ms. Gaines said, was respectful, and the cleanup taken care of by organizers. “They come in, they really create an atmosphere, they play beautiful music, and then they leave the house exactly as they found it,” she said. And, she added, “our doormen think we’re really cool.”
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Part of the Sofar ethos is attention. At the Karen O show, Christine Cook, Sofar’s New York director, explained the rules: no talking, texting or selfies are allowed during the music, though people are encouraged to promote the event on social media during breaks. Audiences are also asked to stay for the whole evening, rather than arriving just in time for the headliner (one reason that Sofar doesn’t list its lineup in advance).
In New York, there are four shows a month, in spaces that typically hold 100 people. Ms. Cook said she gets an average of 500 RVSPs, with attendant plus-ones, for each. To keep the experience special, she strives not to repeat apartments much. The suggested donation is $15, “but we say pay what you think the night is worth, and if you’re a millionaire, come talk to me after,” said Ms. Cook, who is also on the payroll as the company’s content and strategy manager.
Ms. Cook, 22, started as a volunteer, creating the Sofar branch in Seattle as a college student there last year. Now she relies on a team of about 10 unpaid helpers to scout locations, book musicians, engineer audio and clean up. Most are young and eager to get a foothold in the music industry, as she was. “It really does feel like a dream come true,” she said of her new job.
For CMJ, she programmed all the festival showcases herself, featuring the soul singer Shaprece and the poetic duo Iska Dhaaf, both from Seattle, alongside locals like the vocalist Kiah Victoria and the Brooklyn group Stone Cold Fox. (In the Sofar spirit, a majority of the bands have refrained from announcing their CMJ performances.)
Whether Sofar Sounds can turn a profit is an open question, even to its founders. “The honest answer is: We’re not sure, because we never intended it as something that would make any money,” said Mr. Offer, 49, an American and former marketing executive for Disney and Coca-Cola. Initially, he and his partner, Rocky Start, 32, a British marketer, considered it a hobby. But now it’s a business with potential revenue streams, like Sofar-branded festivals; showcases that include a paid tier of tickets; and real-time music recommendation services. The partnership with CMJ is not financial. “We’re thinking about raising a bit more money,” Mr. Offer said, to get “more time to figure out how to make money.”
For now, at least, they have no problem attracting devotees. Julia Easterlin, 25, a singer-songwriter and instrumentalist who performed at the Stockholm Jazz Festival this week, has played 10 Sofar shows. “What draws me back is the community,” she said. As she was standing in someone’s sweaty living room in New York in August, her equipment malfunctioned, without a sound tech there to help. So she asked her listeners to perform her backbeat, snapping and clapping along. Together, they happily finished the song.