Tag: coronavirus

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.

Why local is the answer to a future of new normals

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

This is a rough transcript of my talk at Most Wanted: Music Dial-in on July 20.

Just before the pandemic hit, I started a new project called Hard Dance Berlin.

My intention was to map out the local scenes of harder electronic music and try to bring them together more after I noticed that people like each other’s music, but rarely come together.

I wanted to shine a light on all the local events happening that cater to people who love those sounds and in many weeks found events on 4 of the nights. One week in February even had relevant events all 7 nights. Berlin 💁

But then it stopped. Abruptly. First the cancellations came from concerned organisers and then the lockdown happened and forced organisers who hadn’t caught up yet to also cancel their events.

My vision had been this:

Focusing on local allows people from various scenes to collaborate and create new scenes. By bringing audiences together, we’d be able to support each other. No more having to easyJet around Europe every weekend just to pay the bills as a DJ.

But in the middle of March there was no local to focus on. Everyone’s ‘local’ was reduced to staying at home. While everyone’s at home, focusing on local seems pointless, because what would once emerge as a local subculture from a record shop and venue in a particular city, now emerges through networks of artists on SoundCloud and Instagram.

Organisers and artists scrambled to get livestreams up and running, while the amount of daily new information added an edge of overload to a time of uncertainty.

Something happened since the initial lockdowns:

We went from something that was very hard to grasp and felt completely overwhelming to a certain calm. We know most countries have similar style lockdowns in place. While uncertainty and hardship is part of the daily reality for many of us, things have also become a lot more predictable than back in March and April.

Unfortunately, that is temporary.

We’re now seeing governments inside the EU giving negative travel advice to their citizens traveling to certain countries or regions in Europe.

The most publicised of these are the UK and Germany’s recent travel advice for Spain. Also in the past days, the Dutch government advised their citizens to avoid the Antwerp area after an outbreak, after which the Belgian government gave out a similar warning for The Netherlands.

So while we’re now carefully trying to get live music back on its feet, with proper safety measures in place, we’re seeing a landscape evolve that is as complicated as it was in early March when some cities and regions locked down, but countries were still open… but would they be by the time you had to be there?

Risk management

In order to maintain or increase certainty and predictability, we are seeing organisers of drive-in shows, the rare socially distanced event, and even many livestreams depend on local cultures: venues, crews, artists.

Now let’s imagine a few months forward: we’ll likely see a complicated landscape of lockdowns as countries, states, and cities deal with outbreaks. When all’s clear, events with proper hygiene may be permitted, but when an outbreak occurs the area might go into a form of lockdown at almost no notice.

So let’s imagine next summer. Let’s say that we have a vaccine by then – which is optimistic, but not unrealistic. Will that vaccine give long-term immunity or be more like a flu shot? Can we get it out to large enough parts of our populations – how quickly? And what about all the other places in the world? And then what does the world look like? We’ll know that this can happen again – as it nearly did with bird flu, swine flu, SARS, MERS, you name it.

And what about other crises? Every year we see record temperatures and more extreme weather events. Governments are discussing “green new deals” to reorganise their economies in order to address the crises of climate, waste, and biodiversity.

The new normal is not a static thing: it’s a future of new normals.

So that current local focus we’re seeing: it’s here to stay. It’s risk mitigation. That’s not to say your favourite bands won’t be coming to town anymore: they probably will. But since focusing on local scenes is one of the most effective strategies for mitigating risk in the face of these crises, we’ll see a renaissance of local scenes in an interconnected world – where scenes from Berlin, New Orleans, Shanghai, etc. can be made visible to each other.

By what we’re learning now about building online business models, we can make sure music won’t depend as much on cheap air travel as it used to — because eventually there probably won’t be air travel as cheap as it is now.

So I’d like to encourage everyone to think long-term and build global networks for local impact. Our future kind of depends on it.

Image above by Donny Jiang on Unsplash

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Club Cooee

Better Than Real Life: 8 Generatives

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

Virtual concerts are not here to replace live music. They’re here to provide a new type of entertainment. Personally, I find the average virtual concert dull and inconvenient. It’s dull because it’s usually not more stimulating than a conversation with a friend, playing a video game, reading a book, watching a show on Netflix, or in some cases even scrolling through my Instagram. It’s inconvenient, because I’m supposed to tune in at a specific moment, whereas all other in-home entertainment in my life is basically on-demand.

So, what is better than all those things? What can make people decide to stay at home, rather than catch some fresh summer air before we head into inevitable winter lockdowns?

Virtual music events have to offer things that other types of entertainment can’t. A virtual event has to leverage the context of music, rather than just transmit a performance to an audience. If it is to be sustainable for musicians beyond the pandemic, because they prefer not to travel as much or want to stay more closely connected with fans on a regular basis, it will also have to be in some ways better than the real life equivalent.

A vast number of livestreams are basically just a poor version of an actual live event. The only edge it has is that you can be lazy and stay on your couch (and it’s easier to social distance with a front door between you and the world). So where does a virtual event have an edge? What can you do online that you can’t do in real life?

This post is inspired by Kevin Kelly’s Better Than Free published in 2008. He describes generatives as follows: “a generative value is a quality or attribute that must be generated, grown, cultivated, nurtured. […] In the digital arena, generative qualities add value to free copies, and therefore are something that can be sold.”

Putting it into the context of the post, generatives are qualities or attributes that make people choose virtual events over “real life”.

8 generatives better than real life

Magical powers

Let’s start big: we would all love to have magical powers. Whether it’s flying around a (virtual) venue or invisibly teleporting on to the stage to see what the artists are doing. Through virtual live events you can let people do things they literally can’t do in real life – not because it’s illegal, but because of the constraints of our oft-lamented physical reality.

Figure out what makes sense for you as an artist, band, or organiser and then give your audience superpowers. That could be multi-camera setups that let fans jump around the room and zoom in on what you’re doing, virtual environments in which people can move by flying around, or a telekenetic airhorn that you’ve set up to respond to people’s tips on Twitch.

Interactivity

Recognize people’s contexts and attention span. Asking people to sit on their couch and quietly watch a music performance does not fit most types of music well. Most concerts are interactive: people dance, sing, jump, clap, cheer, drink, take photos, meet people, and perhaps jump into a mosh pit.

The home context is different: there’s mobile phone notifications that compete for attention, there’s messaging apps, there’s that untidy corner of the room you will definitely get around to cleaning up some time this week…

Keep this in mind. You can give people an escape from interactions by making events interactive – even if that just means responding to what’s happening in the chat.

Context synergy

Imagine loving a virtual environment like a video game so much that you spend the majority of your free time in it or even just a few hours a week. Now imagine an artist you’re a fan of coming to this digital space that’s like a virtual home to you. Are you going to go outside and do something else? Hell no.

One could argue that the context of Minecraft or Fortnite is part of ‘real life’ anno 2020. In that case: are you going to play on your usual server and miss that concert? Hell no.

Artist proximity

Fans can feel much closer to an artist from the safety of their home and a keyboard than they might in real life. Some people go up to artists to thank them, some don’t because they don’t want to bother them, and some are just absolutely terrified of the interaction. If there is any interaction, it’s usually a quick thank you and signature after a concert and that’s it.

Online, you can leave room for fans to really interact: you can talk about topics, show them what you’re working on, answer questions, and acknowledge the individual by mentioning their name or nickname on the stream.

Fan community or scene networking

Music brings people together. Before the web, listening to music by an artist you were into was the only way for some people to know that there were other people who feel or think just like them (especially young people). Now you can just Google those feelings and thoughts and go down an internet rabbit hole of communities, so while music has lost that monopoly it’s still a powerful force as a connector.

Although people are still connected to various degrees of their social lives (flatmates, family, close friends, colleagues) they are likely disconnected from further degrees such as acquaintances, people they’d run into at concerts, and other people they’d only meet when at events and social gatherings. Furthermore, while performers would see the scene they’re part of in many cities, many fans wouldn’t be exposed to their own scene in other places.

If this is an important aspect to your music, bringing these scenes and communities together online can create social meaning that’s better than a Zoom call with mom (sorry, moms).

We’ve all seen recently what connected fan communities can do.

Global proximity

Similarly, it’s great to feel closer to the rest of the world while being unable to travel. Many dance music streams will have Zoom sessions running which fans can join in order to broadcast themselves. You’ll see ravers sitting in their living rooms or at their desks, waving flags, drinking, or eating chicken (as seen on-stream during Dominator‘s virtual event). Occasionally, some of these webcams will be shown alongside the performers in the main stream, showing a global fan community from Canada to Brazil to Thailand to Italy (in the case of Dominator, that chicken-eating guy’s backdrop was a Mad Max-like stage with cars and motorbikes making jumps behind the DJ – unfortunately the “in-stream” is not visible on the recordings uploaded to YouTube).

If people have friends far away, they can experience that proximity together by tuning into the same stream. While there are ways to do watch Netflix together in a synced session, it’s not as special as coming together in an event that thousands of others are also using to come together.

An example of DJs "instreaming" a fan during Q-Dance's Qonnect event in April.
An example of DJs “instreaming” a fan during Q-Dance’s Qonnect event in April.

A role to play for the viewer

This was already captured above, but I think the principle is so important that it’s worth making it explicit. Instead of broadcasting a stream and implying fans should just sit down and shut up, you can involve them.

Think instreaming by showing fans’ cams to the wider fan community, by improvising based on fan input, or by letting them interact with each other through magical powers. To put it in Ishkur’s words:

A party exists for its own sake and for the sake of its participants. Your job is to contribute; to interact and celebrate. When you go see Tiesto, you are not contributing anything. You are being a spectator. You might as well be dead.

The premise may be awkward as a performer, but make the event about more than yourself. Let the people who attend participate. Make them part of ‘you’.

Personal example from back in March: with Hard Dance Berlin I created a line-up of performers and then used Plug.dj to let the crowd have a chance to go back to back with the DJs, so DJs would play half of their set time and the crowd was responsible for the other half of the tracks played during that time. The event was called DJs vs Berlin. Afterwards, we opened up the decks to the audience queue.

Another example is audience avatar customization as can be done in Fortnite, Minecraft, IMVU, Club Cooee (pictured at the top) and other virtual event spaces.

FOMO: Fear Of Missing Out

I never listened to Slayer much, but when they announced their last tour I got tickets to their show and started listening to their discography a lot. And the show itself? It was awesome. However, similar decisions motivated by FOMO-related impulses haven’t always panned out as well. Sometimes something was a waste of money or a night better spent asleep. Oh well.

My point: FOMO is powerful. It can make people prioritize things that normally wouldn’t be high on their list. Whether it’s a one-time only virtual event like the screening of Nick Cave’s Idiot Prayer, the release of limited edition merch during a stream, rotating line-ups like the Verzuz battles, or just having unique sets in your events as a result of improvisation and interaction: all of these create FOMO and make people want to tune in instead of going out.

Bonus: if your event doesn’t go as well as you hoped, but is not terrible either, cognitive dissonance will make sure that people’s anticipation translates into satisfaction. (But remember: trust and attention are fickle: do what you can to avoid disappointing people)

A nod to Kevin Kelly’s Better Than Free post, which inspired my own. The post has seen hundreds of comments since publication: if you think I missed something, please leave a comment below.

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