Hal Real, founder of World Cafe Live, steps down, makes way for virtual reality

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The founder of World Cafe Live, Hal Real, has stepped down as leader of the nonprofit West Philadelphia concert venue after 21 years.

“I’m retired from World Cafe Live with no other plans for new ventures at this point,” the 72-year-old entrepreneur and former real estate lawyer said from his vacation home in North Carolina. “I’m taking a breather and figuring out the next chapter.”

The new CEO of World Cafe Live is Joseph Callahan, a technology entrepreneur who acted as director of the philanthropic Bean Foundation.

World Cafe Live shares its building with WXPN, the radio station of the University of Pennsylvania that produces the daily “World Cafe” music program distributed by National Public Radio.

History of World Cafe Live

In the 1990s, Real approached WXPN with an idea to move the campus radio station out of its former cramped quarters in the old Potts Mansion at 3905 Spruce St. and combine resources with a concert venue to make a “house of music for Philly,” Real said.

WCL entered into a licensing agreement with WXPN to use the name “World Cafe.”

“I was puzzled why there weren’t more people over the age of 20 to 30 still going out to discover new artists and hear new music,” he said.

He envisioned “a place that you can go to that has the acoustics of a symphony hall but for jazz and rock ’n’ roll, has decent bathrooms, wasn’t smoky, great sight lines,” Real said. “You can get something good to eat and the show starts not at 11:00 p.m. but at 8:00 p.m., which was a novel idea back then. You can go home and go to work the next day.”

In 2008, Real co-founded the nonprofit Live Connections to augment music education in Philadelphia public schools. In 2019, the entire World Cafe Live operation became a registered nonprofit.

“That mission-driven work was so important to our team, to our staff, and to our supporters that that became a real driving force for us,” he said. “We wanted to do more and more mission-driven work and support it through the more commercial work we were doing.”

Under Hal Real’s leadership, in 2011 World Cafe Live reopened the long-dormant Queen theater in Wilmington, Delaware, and managed it until 2017. WCL pulled out because, as Real said at the time, the financial model was not sustainable. The Queen is now managed by its owner, Buccini Pollin Group.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Real co-founded the National Independent Venue Association to support music venues forced to shut down. NIVA lobbied Congress to pass the $16 billion Shuttered Venue Operators grant program, the largest arts granting program in history.

Streaming and virtual reality at the venue?

Real’s successor, Joseph Callahan, has had no previous involvement with WCL. The technologist is better known for bringing the Portal to Philadelphia. The livestream oculus was installed in LOVE Park to instantly connect users with people in other countries who were likewise standing in front of their own “portals.”

After being vandalized several times, the Philly Portal was moved to the courtyard of City Hall.

Callahan plans to introduce cutting-edge digital streaming technology to the World Cafe Live concert venue. Within three weeks of becoming CEO, Callahan has already launched a virtual reality platform that livestreams concerts as immersive, simulated digital environments that can be accessed anywhere via 3D VR headsets or standard 2D computer screens.

Callahan said WCL will undergo “a 3.0 digital transformation so that the venue can invite the world to experience what happens there, and not just in a physical sense but in a digital sense.”

In the metaverse Callahan developed for WCL, users embodied by a chosen avatar can navigate a digital spatial environment resembling the concert venue. They can interact with the concert in a “room” filled with familiar friends and colleagues, or experience the concert surrounded by strangers.

“We hear it every day: Meta-this, meta-that. It’s projected to be 5% to 7% of our global $100 trillion economy,” Callahan said. “We see it as a natural progression. It nests itself very nicely with trying to present to the world what World Cafe Live is and what it stands for.”

Real said the next chapter for World Cafe Live needs to be led by someone other than himself.

“I’m now in my 70s. I think I’m pretty in tune with technology but that’s not really my baby,” he said. “If Joe can put the ‘world’ in World Cafe Live by using technology and have an impact that goes beyond not only Philly but beyond the U.S. through that technology, I think it would be amazing.”