Tag: corona

Post-pandemic music scenes

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

There is no end in sight to the pandemic. Yet a privileged few are getting a taste of it. A preview. The ingredients of post-pandemic scenes will be an urge to move forward, a nostalgia for what existed before, and the integration of methods of resilience in the new status quo for music.

The urge to prefix ‘post-’

The urge to move forward, to connect with music and each other again, is one of the driving forces behind the demand for events and people’s willingness to spend on it. People who are attending an event for the first time since the start of the pandemic come out, vaccinated or tested, but also people who have been plague raving. While many people have spoken out against plague raves, I’m not aware of any blacklists existing and suspect perpetrators will be quickly forgotten in a wish to move on and reunite.

There are also people who have left the scene: from artists, performers, workers in other domains of music, to party-goers. Some have moved out of cities, some changed careers and became programmers, train drivers, designers. Sad as this may be, it also creates space in the most competitive areas for newcomers who perhaps carry a different vision than the old guard does.

There has always been a certain passing of the torch, usually gradually. Now we’ll see it in high contrast.

Nostalgia

Nostalgia comes in many forms. Younger generations will be nostalgic for a future they anticipated having. They’re going to manifest that future now. Then there are the people that are frozen in time. One day in February or March 2020, they left the club and went home, expecting to do the same thing next weekend. For them, in part of the world, that weekend is finally emerging.

This dynamic is also manifesting in music, creating an interesting tension between new emerging visions and the desire to return to our old place of comfort. It’s a perfect recipe for new sounds that integrate throwbacks – whether that’s Britney Spears vocals, 90s subculture aesthetics, or pop punk. 

Methods of resilience

Livestreams, NFTs & DAOs, and countless new formal and informal organisations have all emerged as methods to offer resilience in a period of hardship. Instead of zeroing in on specifics, like we do in the links section of the newsletter, let’s look at the bigger picture.

Normalization of virtual music experiences.

Livestreams and other types of virtual music experiences will sit alongside other offers. They may be highly socialized or ‘single player’ and need to adopt ‘better than real life’ strategies in order to succeed.

Interconnected communities.

Virtual events and Discords connected international communities in ways they weren’t before. While previously the connections were through traveling musicians and promoters, now people from different places have connected through music in another way. This change may be difficult to spot for most readers who have been creatively or professionally involved in music for years, but it’s tangible for superfans as well as aspiring artists just starting out.

New formal networks.

The past year has seen organisations form from the events sector lobbying and trying to stay afloat to social justice organisations standing up for people in music. These organisations are constantly finding ways to stay relevant and help people deal with the issues of the day. They’ll be able to provide representation post-pandemic where previously representation didn’t exist (or struggled to gain visibility).

New informal networks.

Most networks don’t have a name or legal entity, so the changes happening here are harder to represent, but crucial to music going forward. For example: in Berlin, organizers have been allowed to throw gigs outdoors, but with 8 months of gloomy weather per year, the city’s not exactly set up for this. People have scrambled to organize spaces, assisted by formal networks, but coming together in new configurations that previously didn’t exist, with no formal name to signify them. The connections being shaped & the integration of previously disconnected networks will shape at least part of the post-pandemic music landscape in cities around the world.

Web3.

For substance, read everything or anything we’ve already written about on this topic. In short, communities can now turn the value they create into money by raising funds through NFTs and other types of tokens. This goes into platform-agnostic community bank accounts. It’s a powerful dynamic that will be as influential for the next generation of culture as the web 2.0 was for the previous. It gives more people the chance to opt out of the status quo & do things differently. I’m particularly curious how collectives & the informal networks that formed during the pandemic will utilize this for events (real & virtual), merch (real & virtual), and to support their creative work.

At the beginning of the year, we anticipated 2021 would be characterized by new scarcity models. Rather, it’s not just the year – it’s the decade.

One year of COVID-19 lockdowns

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

It’s been a year since I sent out the first MUSIC x CORONA email: the newsletter turned all of the most important music-related pandemic headlines into a daily digest (since November it’s been folded into MUSIC x). One year later, we take a moment to reflect on that extremely uncertain time.

This week, one year ago

On March 11, 2020, the coronavirus outbreak was officially classified as a pandemic by the World Health Organisation. In the first weeks of March 2020, global stock markets saw a series of crashes, the worst being on March 16 when the Dow Jones saw the single largest point drop in history. Italy was the first country in Europe to enter lockdown, with people there expecting concert cancellations until May and then a recovery. Meanwhile, they waited and sang on their balconies.

Schemes to help live music were launched. In the UK, the government abolished business rates for small venues. Sound Royalties launched an advance fund. Bandcamp announced its first COVID-19 fundraiser, which would see monthly repeats and become known as Bandcamp Fridays. The American Guild of Musical Artists set up a fund, the Recording Academy and MusiCares set up a fund, and UK Music started calling on the government for a support scheme similar to the one already in place in Denmark.

There was a strong sense that ‘this could be it’ for the music business. Various essays outlined that the streaming model alone can’t support the industry and called on people to support artists more directly.

In an effort to explore ways to stay connected and potentially identify new revenue sources, artists turned to livestreaming:

This week, next year

One year ago, few of us imagined we’d still be in a state of lockdowns right now. Although it should be noted that for many workers & entrepreneurs in music the situation is absolutely dire, some of the worst case scenarios didn’t become reality.

While the music business still struggles with necessary restrictions and (sometimes unnecessary) uncertainty, things are a lot more predictable than one year ago. The past year has clearly shown that innovation lies not just with technology, but also the application thereof. We’ve been able to celebrate countless artists who put their creative force into livestreaming, virtual and mixed reality, new business models, or NFTs. They dreamt up ways to use this tech to build connections and new revenue and brought innovation into the world. Artists are innovators.

This thing is not over yet. As vaccinations will allow for certain parts of the world to almost completely open for business again in 2021, I implore everyone to remain supportive of industry workers in countries where vaccines are not expected to be readily available this year.

The pandemic is a bleeping marathon. I want to say “congrats! You’ve made it this far,” but we’re not at the finish line yet. So instead, a pat on the shoulder and a drink of water in the form of the MUSIC x newsletters to keep you going. It’s been rough, especially with lockdown fatigue setting in after all these long dark months in the northern hemisphere. The days are getting warmer, vaccination numbers higher… just a little bit further.

As a 2020 veteran, 2021 will be a breeze. You got this.

Image
Music-related meme circulating the web during the first months of the pandemic. Please consult local health authorities for the most up to date guidance.

The MUSIC x CORONA newsletter archives are available for free and provide an organised daily snapshot of how the music industry dealt with the pandemic in 2020. The newsletter has since been folded into MUSIC x, which you can subscribe to for free at http://musicx.email.

You can support our work on Patreon: http://patreon.com/musicx

Vaccination Passport example

Guide: Vaccination passports & their role in reopening live music

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer | 1 Comment on Guide: Vaccination passports & their role in reopening live music

After a year of lockdowns, the live music business still faces as much uncertainty as it did in 2020. One of the solutions under consideration is the use of vaccination passports to make events exclusive to people who have received a vaccination. It’s a seemingly straightforward solution, but politically sensitive and technically complicated. Here’s the MUSIC x analysis, jointly written by Bas Grasmayer and Maarten Walraven.

[Disclaimer: Bas started the daily MUSIC x CORONA newsletter one year ago (now folded into MUSIC x), bringing on Maarten a little while later. Despite having studied Covid-19 and its impact on the music industry daily, we are not policy or public health experts. Furthermore, this is one of the most actively researched topics right now. New insights emerge regularly. Please consult local experts when planning & find the most up to date information.]

What are vaccination passports?

A ‘vaccination passport’ is a government-sanctioned form of evidence that the holder thereof has been vaccinated against Covid-19. The concept started appearing early in the pandemic, for example as part of an ‘immunity passport’ study by German researchers who wanted to find out how lockdown restrictions could be lifted for some people. 

Fast forward to today, plus a five hour flight away, and we find Israel as one of the first countries in the world to use a vaccination passport in order to ease restrictions. The country has already given over half of its population at least one vaccine dose. The plan, called the Green Pass, allows people to visit gyms, hotels, theatres, and concerts by showing a QR code. When scanned, it tells the business whether that person has been vaccinated recently. 

China has launched a similar scheme, which integrates with WeChat and is intended to make international travel possible. The EU will come with a similar proposal this month, dubbed a Digital Green Pass. Now, international governments are opening talks about mutual recognition of each others’ certificates in order to allow a return of unrestricted travel – or at least travel with less limitations.

Travel

This is where the topic of vaccination passports gets hairy. The World Health Organisation has cautioned against such certificates for international travel, due to the still limited global availability of vaccines. This leads to practical and ethical concerns, the latter stemming from the fact that existing inequalities get reinforced and amplified due to the unavailability of vaccines in large, mostly poorer, parts of the world.

This is not the only ethical concern.

Ethics

For a year now, we’ve all craved to ‘get back to normal’. Therefore there are justified concerns that certain vaccination passport schemes may get rushed. This would leave a number of ethical challenges unaddressed:

People who can’t or won’t get vaccinated. Leaving aside that not everyone might be able to get a jab as soon as they want it, there are people who, for health reasons like pregnancy, immunodeficiency, or allergies, can’t get vaccinated. In some places in the world, certain ethnic minorities are vaccine hesitant. That goes not just for developing countries, but even the UK. How is this dealt with? What aspects of public life are they excluded from? What accommodations are made for them? For how long? Can employers require proof of vaccination?

Privacy & security. Throughout the past year, a lot of expertise has been built up around this topic. One of our favourite examples of a privacy-friendly contact tracing app is closecontact, born out of Berlin’s club culture. Unfortunately, there are also examples of security fuck ups, like in The Netherlands where its national ‘municipal health service’ (GGD) had a data leak with millions of data points, which was then sold online (not by hackers, but by call center employees who could export everyone’s private data with a single click). In the same country, a provider of corona tests also had a data leak that exposed thousands of people. So the question is: how do these systems get designed in a way that respect privacy and don’t accidentally end up exposing sensitive information, like medical history, contacts, passport numbers, bank info or social security numbers?

Immunity

The next difficult question is how long immunity actually lasts and how different vaccination passport schemes account for that. The big question since the early days of the pandemic was: can you catch it twice? The answer to that is complicated.

While it is currently uncommon for people to catch Covid-19 twice, it is possible, as scientists in Hong Kong recently confirmed. A key word in the preceding sentence is currently, since it’s not yet known how long immunity lasts which is likely to differ from person to person. It is also unclear whether being protected by antibodies means you can’t harbour and transmit the virus to other people.

Oh, and there are open questions around the various mutations.

That’s all fine & dandy, but…

Yes. The upsides. 

We are so close to finally being able to work towards the recovery of so many sectors of our lives and societies. Patience is running thin, especially in countries where many people haven’t been able to count on any significant financial support from employers or governments.

Vaccine passports are happening. They’re already a thing in Israel and China, whereas the EU & many other countries will likely have their own schemes in place by summer. While we depend on our governments for guidance and support, it’s also up to all of us to take responsibility. Governments don’t always act in everyone’s best interest, e.g. in the case of Tanzania, where the government has been falsely claiming they’re Covid-19 free. 

So, don’t be a Villalobos and fly to Zanzibar for a plague rave. If you’re planning a tour in a country where venue wheelchair access isn’t government-mandated, do you just say “too bad” and exclude part of your fanbase? It’s a complicated topic and we don’t intend to put things in black/white terms: there is plenty of room for nuance and hard trade-offs. The point is: our responsibility doesn’t end where the law ends.

The return of live

So what’s next for live music? Are we heading into a period where live concerts and festivals start up with access restricted to those who can prove they have either been vaccinated or have a recent negative test result? It’s not a straightforward decision. In the UK, after the government announced its roadmap towards opening up society after 21 June, Reading & Leeds and Creamfields festivals sold 170k tickets in three days (whether this number includes those tickets punters kept from the previous year is not something we’ve been able to verify through their public statements). The optimism of the UK government’s roadmap isn’t shared across the European continent, let alone the rest of the world. Festivals such as Rock am Ring & Rock im Park in Germany have just been cancelled. Other organizations have moved their festivals to the fall (see: Bonnaroo, Slam Dunk, Aftershock) or are still postponed from 2020 for later this year, such as Wonderfruit. It’s all up in the air, it seems, which is one reason why organisers are keen on certainty and a Covid passport can provide it. 

Responsibility

A concert promoter, festival organiser and even artists themselves work with varying levels of insurances surrounding concerts, festivals, and tours in 2021. Whether any future cancellations are covered by insurance depends on many variables. In one landmark case in the US from last year where the venue The Raven & the Bow took their insurer to court, it seems that the parties worked out their differences outside of the courts. In other words, no precedent has been set there. In countries such as the Netherlands and Germany (but not yet the UK) governments have set up insurance schemes to secure organisations for their losses should they need to cancel because of variants or other unexpected pandemic-related changes. 

Similar to these insurance schemes, putting in place a Covid passport is something that governments will have to take the lead on. Søren Eskilde, of Danish festival Smukfest – due to take place early August – puts it as follows:

“The government has to provide a phased plan with certain criteria that must be met for us to hold a festival. For example, a dialogue about the possibilities of the quick test and what the corona pass will be able to do to get as safe and sound on its feet as possible.”

Similarly, Eric van Eerdenburg, director of Dutch festival Lowlands – scheduled for late August – firmly told NME [ed. note: emphasis ours]: 

“As long as there are restrictions then there will be a need for testing and maybe vaccination passports. It’s not something we’ll push upon the people, but if the government says we have to then we will. We won’t make it up ourselves because it’s a hell of a lot of work. It’s a government that should impose that upon the people.” 

Concert and festival organisers alike have made their day-job out of problem-solving, but they need clear guidance from their governments. If that guidance includes a vaccination passport, organisers will move forward and implement that solution to bring big crowds together. In other words, this means that responsibility for whether big and small music events can go ahead lies squarely with those same governments. Give a mouse a cookie… and they’ll put 50,000 people together in a field. 

Effectiveness, or what’s possible

Will a vaccination passport even be effective when it comes to visiting a concert or festival? Can you completely exclude Covid-19 from your event this summer with rapid testing and vaccination passports? Two questions that probably get two very different answers from the promoters of concerts and organisers of festivals versus the epidemiologists and public health experts. The reason for that lies with the risk involved. Is, to put it bluntly, a little bit of Covid at your event manageable, or a risk that should be completely avoided? There are festivals that aim to go ahead with rapid testing, like Albanian festival Unum which has its government’s blessing, even though there’s the issue of false negatives. Furthermore, talk of variants gets everyone’s hair to stand up on the back of their necks. Especially when it comes to the question of a vaccine’s effectiveness against them. It’s in the nature of a virus to mutate so it makes sense that vaccines will need upgrades in the future in the form of booster shots. But as Dr. Michael Head, Senior Research Fellow in Global Health at the University of Southampton, told NME: “we’d rather that didn’t happen this year and that we could have a bit of time to prepare for that kind of thing.” The message there is clear, do not rush anything this summer, or even this year. There are so many unknowns and to invite those to play havoc would be a bad idea. 

Where to draw the line then? It makes sense to think about a couple of things when it comes to events this summer and fall. 

  • Think local, both in terms of line-ups and in terms of visitors. The risks around international travel are greater than those on the national, or even better, regional levels. This also includes the rules around quarantines for artists travelling around, or sudden lockdowns and travel restrictions. 
  • Focus on scientifically backed trials that help set boundaries on how to operate a large event within a pandemic. Remember that trial in Germany and their advice:
    • No full capacity concerts
    • Only seated concerts
    • Increased number of entry points
    • Mask-wearing mandatory
    • Consume food and drinks while seated
    • Adequate ventilation systems (for indoor events)
    • Hygiene stewards to enforce rules
  • In light of the previous point, focus on a steady return to full capacity shows. It’s great to finally be able to put concerts and festivals back on, but they don’t necessarily need to be at full capacity immediately. Let’s wait until, for example, we move from a pandemic to an endemic situation. 
  • Think about hybrid events. Livestreaming is here to stay and offers both a different dynamic and a way to engage a broader geographical audience. One example is Montreux Jazz Festival who are still hoping for a live and in-person festival in July, but have also prepared for the music to stream live and reach people regardless. 

Considering the above three points, a vaccination passport would not make too much of a difference. Of course, if you take a strict policy that only vaccinated people can attend your event, that will exclude a bunch of non-vaccinated people (whether by choice or circumstance). It could be an option this summer, whether it’s one to take is another question. And as shown in the above quotes by festival organisers, the tendency in the industry will be to jump headfirst into problem-solving mode and to get your festival, or concert, up and running with as many visitors as possible. There is a responsibility at the government level to set expectations that are realistic and, preferably, will take into account various scenarios. 

Will an event’s target audience actually be vaccinated by the time planned events occur? Most vaccination schemes are prioritized by age group, so might classical music, the audience of which tends to skew older, be one of the first genres to return to normal? To what degree will we be able to count on international and especially intercontinental travel?

Even with vaccination passports, 2021 is shaping up to be a year with much uncertainty and pioneering.

Photo by Lukas on Unsplash.

If you want to start a music brand, don’t wait until the pandemic is over

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

Without live music, it may feel like a bad time to start a music brand. However when considering the realities of the post-pandemic landscape and the opportunities on the road to there, now is exactly the right time.

Post-pandemic

We’re probably a year away from things going back to normal. People are hopeful for the summer season, but it may not look like last year’s summer at all. Germany’s top virologist, Christian Drosten, has warned that 2021’s summer could be much worse than 2020’s:

“The fact that we had such a relaxed summer in 2020 probably had to do with the fact that our case numbers stayed below a critical threshold in the spring. But that’s not the case now.”

Getting case numbers down remains hard, because of the high infection rates in many areas and the newly mutated virus strains which are more contagious.

Drosten argues against early relaxation of lockdowns to avoid scenarios of overload in hospitals in the summer – which would lead to a summer lockdown. The article doesn’t mention what early relaxation means, but it will obviously be difficult for politicians to extend current measures deep into spring. Which, tragically, means that we have a realistic scenario of a summer spike in COVID-19 cases.

The longer this goes on, the greater the wear on the infrastructure that brings so many musicians and fans together: agencies, events, clubs, suppliers, the artists themselves… they’re all facing uncertainty and many of them will not make it to the finish line. This means that the normal we’ll go ‘back to’, will be quite different from the normal we knew before. In a sense, this can be seen as music’s 9/11 moment in the sense that there’s a demarcation of before and after or perhaps more aptly: music’s second Napster moment.

From 2021 onward, live music will have to do more with less. This may create an (even) more competitive landscape. While music fans’ eagerness to see live music and party may create large demand, the infrastructure to supply that demand is highly regulated (think: crowd & fire safety, noise regulation, alcohol licenses, sanitation, etc.) and may not be able to scale back up quickly.* I suspect there will be a lot of emerging opportunity in the informal sphere (house parties, illegal raves, etc.).

It will be hard work to launch a music brand in the competitive space of post-pandemic live music, so get started now so you’re positioned to seize the opportunities when they emerge.

* Sidenote: if this scenario of undersupply plays out like that, it will be interesting to see how it affects pricing and what role livestreaming can play to make up for the limited supply.

Pre-“post-pandemic” opportunities

What opportunities can you leverage today in order to set up a resilient music brand for the post-pandemic landscape?

Wielding influence and getting opportunities in music is highly correlated by your ability to get things in front of an audience. So, building a music brand is about building audience. If you can show you can get a crowd to a venue, the venue is more likely to give you a chance or better conditions (e.g. not having to pay fees, getting weekend slots, etc.). The same for the artists you can attract: if you can create significantly more opportunities for the artist than they already have, they’ll consider working with you. So, aside from defining your music category and brand positioning, goal number 1 should be:

Build visible audience.

If you don’t have any music you can release, start with curation. The mix of channels you’ll maintain is quite similar to when you release music. Consider the below:

  • Instagram. In my opinion one of the most important tools for music networking right now (read: Instagram vs SoundCloud: the battle for the center of music culture). For posts, focus on shareable content like memes related to your subculture / genre / scene. Instagram creates extra visibility for new features, so at the time of writing that means: create reels and add the music you stand for. Use stories to drive your audience to your other channels (set up a Linktree or similar) and to recycle previous posts to your audience’s growing audience.
  • TikTok. There are a lot of articles about how, if you’re after Gen Z, you should use TikTok. That’s bullshit. The platform is growing beyond its early demographics (John Lennon and David Bowie have profiles there now). So if your audience skews older, then get there before other music brands in your scene get there. Cut in front of them. When they join the platform, you’ll not only be an example to them, but also to the artists and events they represent.
  • Spotify. Playlist follower counts are public, so this is an important way of building visible audience and connecting people to your brand on a regular basis. Brand connection bonus: unlike with social media, people actually don’t have to look at their screen to be connected to you through curated music.

    A basic strategy would be to create two playlists. In the first, you just add all relevant tracks you can find. Try different searches for your genre and see what shows up. Claim gaps by using keywords in your title and playlist description. I did this with a Jersey club playlist I made (though I didn’t have a specific goal in mind) and was shocked to find out it had grown to hundreds of followers. Use a playlist organising tool (here are some) to reorder your playlist weekly or monthly, so that it always looks fresh when people land on the playlist (some tools remove and re-add all tracks, which creates new “added to playlist” dates for all tracks).

    Set up a second playlist, but restrict its length to 20-30 tracks. Change at least half of the tracks each week and make sure most music is released recently (e.g. last ~3 months). Add the day of the week that you refresh it to the title or description, so people know with what interval to come back to your playlist. Give everyone else a reminder through your social media whenever you refresh your Hyperpop Sunday, Post-punk Monday, Wobble Wednesday or 2step Tuesday playlist.

Depending on your scene and whether you’re releasing music yourself, you may use other channels like SoundCloud, YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, Facebook (for the groups and events), etc. But as a start, don’t take on more than 2-3 channels. Get them up and running. It’s a lot of work.

Later on, you can set up a network on Discord, so that the creators and fans of the music you’re promoting on Instagram and Spotify can actually talk to each other, share music, etc. A community will help you to spot trends, new talent, and potential new collaborators (for example, you’ll probably have a need for visual artists, since your mediums are mostly visual).

If you’re planning on doing events, make an extra effort to showcase local talent and to build local audience: you’re going to need it when you start hosting your first events.

Develop experience in audience activation.

Your business will depend on your ability to get fans to go to gigs, buy merchandise, stream music, etc. As soon as you get some type of following, you should start learning about how to do these things.

Livestreams are a perfect way to learn how to get people excited and committed to something. If you’re not ready to sell tickets, that’s fine: people are paying with their time, so there’s still a transaction that will inform you about their commitment and the quality of what you’ve put together.

Financially and emotionally, it’s a lot less painful to have a livestream with only a few viewers than it is to have a new release flop or have DJs and bands play to an empty room. Livestreams are your training wheels for the real thing.

Livestreams also let you know who’s in the room, plus you can connect with a global pool of talent (timezones permitting) rather than whoever shows up to your local events. This allows you to build a network significantly faster than previously (with exceptions of those times a genre starts bubbling up online and is not represented well offline, e.g. the early days of moombahton).

You can also go beyond the livestream and throw full-on virtual events in Minecraft, in plug.dj, or various other tools. Make sure to record these events, since it will provide you with content you can share through your various channels.

Finally, these digital counterparts of the live music experience will have some role to play in the post-pandemic landscape. Having experience in this area will give you a special advantage.

In conclusion.

Just a two-word conclusion if you’re thinking about starting a music brand.

Start now.

Photo by Mike van den Bos on Unsplash