Tag: live music

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.

The community-owned rave: event organisers as DAOs

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

This piece explores the intersection of underground rave culture and Web 3 concepts like decentralized autonomous organisations.

Lately I’ve been thinking about an idea I had pre-pandemic. I wanted to set up a local rave night to fill a gap I perceived in Berlin’s nightlife. I mentally prepared myself to do all the heavy lifting involved in setting up a new club night – something I’d witnessed from friends taxiing artists around, losing money on events, having to staff the entrance, handling logistics, and of course doing the promo. The pandemic put all those ideas on hold and helped generate a new perspective on things.

Goal-oriented

I previously explored what artists’ fanbases can look like as blockchain-based decentralized autonomous organisations (DAOs) – I recommend reading it if you’re not familiar with DAOs. One important aspect for DAOs is that they should have a clear reason to exist, so that people have something clear to organise around and identify new initiatives.

For events, that goal is pretty straightforward: for example to run a number of events per year (e.g. 6, 12, 24) with a clear musical and subcultural footprint (e.g. hyperpop meets queer hardtechno).

There are lots of activities to take care of, such as:

  • Artist bookings
  • Travel & accommodation (unless fully local)
  • Artwork & design
  • Promotion
  • Venue decoration
  • Tickets & admissions

Many of these require funds and when starting out there’s always a risk you won’t break even. DAOs can mitigate that risk and distribute the heavy lifting surrounding these tasks to a passionate community.

Community-owned raves

My first association with the above words would actually be ‘free party’ culture and teknivals of the 90s, as pioneered by Spiral Tribe (artwork above). They would travel country & continent with soundsystems and throw public raves that were free to attend (and usually illegal). The idea was that by being at the rave, you were not just audience, you’re a participant – a similar mindset to Burning Man‘s ethos. The teknival scene still exists today, by the way.

But what would a community-owned rave look like if it could somehow be formalized?

  • Persistent community. Most events have an audience that reconvenes and persists through brief gatherings. Part of the audience will be ‘regulars’ and part will be newcomers. It can be hard to know which part is which and to really feel connected. By making sure the community is organised outside of the context of the occasional event, the community can exist in a persistent state and experience connectedness daily. (see also: Why local is the answer to a future of new normals)
  • Shared outcome ownership. The community puts together the events. This may be a representative democratic process, where people get elected to a board or special crews, e.g. for artist selection, brand and artwork, and perhaps various ongoing activities like music releases, mixtapes and podcasts, meetups, listening sessions, etc. This way the output and outcome is a collective responsibility.
  • Tokenized. Participants should be rewarded. Most underground events don’t make a lot of money, and don’t have a goal to make lots of cash, so rewards for contributions could come in the form of tokens which give people the ability to participate in the governance of the DAO or get access to other perks. Event tickets could represent a token, which gives you a way to essentially peg token prices to fiat money and automatically make attendees community members (I’d make sure to only sell 1 per person though – maybe translating actual attendance to tokens, rather than just holding the ticket. I’d also carefully think through the implications of attendance always representing 1 token).
  • Proposals & voting. People can submit proposals for artists, event decoration, and peripheral activities. They can request budgets in the form of tokens which they can hold (for governance or to let them accrue value) or cash out in order to finance their activity.

The exact mechanics would depend a lot on the community and what it wants to incentivise. For example, in some contexts you might want to encourage people to spread the word by sharing photos of the events, but some events might enforce strict no-photos rules so that people can be themselves without the pressures of being seen on social media (or worst case: becoming a meme).

Not public, not private, but community events

One example of how this might work can be gleaned from the Friends With Benefits (FWB) DAO, which is a creative community that requires people to buy $FWB tokens in order to participate. It then rewards tokens, as described in the bullet points above, for certain activities. While I personally would avoid throwing up high economic barriers to participatio, for the sake of inclusivity (which is also why many events in Berlin have flexible entrance prices, e.g. minimum 5, but 10 if you can afford it), FWB has been able to create an economic space where members can reward each other with tokens that can be cashed out in order to finance projects. (I don’t mean to imply FWB in general is not inclusive – it’s just a general concern I have with regards to onboarding people into tokenized communities)

This has translated into a real-life event in Miami recently, with DJs like Yves Tumor and Jubilee, that you could only attend if you held a certain number of tokens. For those from out of town, the community created a city guide which can be unlocked in exchange for tokens. It’s an excellent example of how communities can create value for other members either through direct activities (events) or peripheral (guides) and how that value can then flow around the community. All of this didn’t exist a year ago, so what they’ve been able to achieve and fund is incredible.

Stronger together

Many events already function as decentralized autonomous organisations in informal ways. Connecting it to the Web3 allows the community to persist across the metaverse and leverage NFTs, communal creation, and channel the unique talents of all involved.

It gives a certain predictability too. If you have a big community around your event, it can be tough picking artists for your line-up, since you only have so much time per night, which means not everyone will get to play. If the community becomes self-sustaining and energized, it should be easy for the organisation to make a risk assessment and set up more event nights.

It could even extend its footprint, so that people in other cities can set up local chapters under the same brand. Over time, the DAO becomes representative of a subculture and may see artist exchanges and people traveling to each other’s cities to meet community members there and experience the local chapter’s events. At scale, the DAO and the new subculture might become synonymous, though it’s also possible to think small and keep it to a small, local community of fans & friends.

The choice is yours – and theirs.

x

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Live music is all you need, right? A hybrid tale

Posted on | by Maarten Walraven-Freeling | 2 Comments on Live music is all you need, right? A hybrid tale

Changes that had been simmering in the live music industry for years accelerated during the pandemic. It’s hard to find an artist who hasn’t done a livestream nowadays and this has pushed musicians to ask more directly what their fans want and want to pay for. Similarly, games have provided stages for music in lieu of the physical format. At the same time, we see the first glimpses of in-person events and how they might take shape with and without restrictions. Here, I will take stock of where we stand right now through some of my own recent experiences and how I see this play out as a tale of hybrid events in the near future.

Livestreaming and in-game experiences

Some livestreams are more successful than others, this was already the case before the pandemic hit, but certainly reverberated throughout the last year. Cherie Hu got to the essence of what all successful livestreams share: intimacy/proximity, production quality, and frequency/consistency. What we should add to that is to make the livestreaming experience something totally different from what the in-person live experience is. There’s no replicating the energy of audiences in a venue and the touch of bodies in a moshpit or the power of sound hitting you in the gut. At the same time, livestreaming offers an opportunity to create something unique. And this runs from Norah Jones topping the streaming charts with her intimate, one-camera home shows to the concert venue Ancienne Belgique building a carbon copy of their venue in the Unreal Engine and dubbing it Nouvelle Belgique.

Being with the artist

What Norah Jones, and other mainly singer-songwriter style artists, have managed so well with their livestreams is bring their fans really close. Of course, it helps to be an open person who’s happy to let their fans into their homes and interact with them via video and chat. It would be difficult, for example, to see someone like The Knife or others artists who shroud themselves in mystery do the same. For those who can do it authentically, though, the intimate livestream is a winner. Fans love being close up and getting to interact with their favorite musicians directly.

There’s some precedent for this type of live experience inside music venues. From lie down concerts to those famous Snarky Puppy ‘headphone concerts‘ that allow fans to step into the studio with the band while having a personal live experience. It will be interesting to see if this type of concert will gain further traction post-pandemic. With more artists opting for perhaps smaller settings to offer fans a unique and intimate live experience. Such live events can even sit right into a regular tour schedule. While talking to Angela Huang for WHO KNEW The Smartest People in the Room she mentioned how premium ticketing, and especially VIP ticketing, works best when the experience gets created with the fan in mind.

In-game experiences

It’s also that fan-first mindset that puts artists like Travis Scott and Kaskade into Fortnite‘s Party Royale: their fans also play the game. A logical next step is for real-world venues to create an existence in the metaverse (similar to former Berlin-based club Griessmuehle being rebuilt in Minecraft). Brussels-based Ancienne Belgique took this leap and worked together with VR studio Poolpio and Granola Studios‘ Yabal application to copy their venue inside the virtual world of the Unreal engine. In a way this experiment aims to recreate the ‘real’ concert experience:

  • the artist performs on the actual Ancienne Belgique stage in a motion capture suit and is made visible on the Nouvelle Belgique stage
Inside the Ancienne Belgique during the Zwangere di-GUY-taal livestream
Inside the Nouvelle Belgique
  • Lights were done inside the Nouvelle Belgique venue by the light technicians of the Ancienne Belgique
The lightshow
  • The artist has big screens to see the avatars of the audience allowing for some form of fan-artist interaction. They can also read the chat

Overall, I feel this type of experience is a great addition to live music. It allows, for example, artists to connect with younger audiences who might not otherwise get to go to live gigs yet. It’s also a more fun and interactive way to experience a concert than simply seeing what cameras record happening on stage. This first gig in the Nouvelle Belgique showed glimpses of even more potential. Right at the end the floor opened up and it would be great if my avatar could, for example, fall into the crack and have to respawn.

Fan strategies

How many artists do you support directly right now? Through Patreon, Bandcamp, OnlyFans, etc.? Flipping the value relationship between artist and fan; getting the fan to pay directly to the artist. Again, this wasn’t a new development but one that definitely accelerated through the pandemic. The type of fan strategies related to the subscription models consider how, as an artist, you can add value for your fans in their lives. This goes way beyond the live experience, but the model has strong roots inside the live industry. Going back to the idea of VIP tickets, the question that underpins every decision is: what does the fan want?

More on gaming

Besides asking what the fan wants, the question is also: where is the fan? How willing, for example, is the average classic rock fan to download a gaming platform and create an avatar? In a report by Twitch and MIDiA the focus sits on the existence of an actual digital fandom. In other words, what music can learn from gaming is that there’s a growing fanbase that will engage online first. Similar to gamers streaming, artists can go beyond subscriptions and towards what would be in-game items. Here, I’m thinking of premium comments, shout-outs, a special look for an avatar, etc. These are all elements that musicians can learn from when they approach their fans in a virtual environment.

Post-pandemic touring: a hybrid offer

We’re seeing some glimpses of live music coming back to us recently. In places like New Zealand this amounts to proper stadium shows without any restrictions. Elsewhere, we see events with rapid testing and other restrictions. In Singapore, for example, the focus is on pre-event testing while fully vaccinated people can skip this. Where I live, in the Netherlands, there’s a combination of experiments with and without restrictions. Attending an actual, in-person concert is still second-to-none in terms of energy as I got to experience as part of the ‘testing for access‘ trial.

Eric Vloeimans’ Gatecrash live at TivoliVredenburg, 19 April 2021

That said, I see the future more as a hybrid live tale. Next to the live gig, there will be livestreams offering intimate and close-up experiences that will keep people at home instead of going out. For some artists and their fans virtual worlds, including the metaverse, will be where they meet and interact. For others, geography will be the biggest factor. Starting a livestream will simply open up a concert to much wider audience. Moreover, those who watch on a screen may have the opportunity to check in backstage before the gig or have the option to choose the camera focused on the drummer or the bass player. All of this will help drive artists to consider the best approach for them and their fans and at the same time open up a whole new way to directly add value in both directions: from artist to fan and vice versa.

Pandemic state of mind: global vs local

Posted on | by Maarten Walraven-Freeling

‘The end is in sight’, ‘vaccines are here’, ‘let’s have a party’. We are at such a different juncture of the pandemic right now than we were a year ago. At the start of the pandemic governments were hesitant to impose widescale lockdowns because they were so different from what ‘normal’ was at the time. When lockdowns did get instituted the general consensus was that we were all in it together. A driver that hits us up with adrenaline and a can-do spirit. Now, we’re exhausted and we need to tap into our collective determination; which is a very different energy. Right now, we need governments to get us out of the ‘pandemic normal’ and into a life that will lead us into something else altogether. Let’s see where we are at in the pandemic, what’s on the horizon, and where we should focus our energies.

[ed. note: I am not a public health expert, please consult with experts when planning events, travel, etc.]

The state of the pandemic

If you want to know at what level of threat the pandemic is there’s basically two ways of looking at it:

1. the global view

The global view isn’t pretty. Trawling through the data on the WHO Coronavirus (Covid-19) Dashboard doesn’t make for pretty reading. Overall, at a global scale infections are rising for the 7th week in a row. At the same time, the number of vaccines doses administered is at over 733 million at the time of writing. That’s a positive, but there remain many unknowns. In a recent article for The Verge, Monica Chin explored what it will take in terms of vaccinations before we can open up again. Although she gets many different answers from the experts she spoke to one thing seemed clear: we need a 70-80% vaccination rate to achieve something resembling herd immunity. To achieve that at a global scale is very far away and the WHO raised the alarm on what they call a ‘shocking imbalance‘ in the way vaccines are distributed.

2. the local view

In some localities around the world many people have already had their vaccine jabs. Israel still leads the way, the UK does well, Chile and the US too.

But what if you’re in India (second wave ‘tsunami’) or Brazil (the crisis intensifies still)? The picture looks very different. This has been the case for some time now of course. If you live in New Zealand (hello stadium tour), your perception of the pandemic will be very different than if you live in the Philippines (hang in there 300 Covid-19 patients waiting in line at the hospital).

Similarly, there’s the danger of variants that mean the world on a local scale will look to shut down travel from certain other parts of the world. Axios has a Variant Tracker, which looks into the various variants and their prevalence in the US. What these variants mean, how they’ll develop, and what the impact will be on the pandemic is still to be determined. It’s the big uncertainty moving forward and science can only do so much without being able to test, prove and disprove.

Where’s the music?

Of course, we all want to go back to concerts, festivals, live experiences that involve people in close proximity. There are many local experiments that try, and succeed, at proving that it’s possible to host events in a safe manner. In the Netherlands there’s the Fieldlab Experiments. They’ve shown already (like others before them) that it’s possible to host a safe event where audiences behave predictably, spaces have good ventilation, people test before the event, and adhere to social distancing restrictions. Next up are the festivals and testing is the most important as audiences will not behave or move predictably at a festival site.

Testing and vaccines are the big hope of the live music industry. Even without herd immunity, the idea of vaccination passports is here, and most likely here to stay. In some localities the passport is already alive, but this is in notably rich countries. Will we see artists touring on a vaccination passport? And audiences travelling with their proof of vaccination in hand? For sure, this will happen, and privacy is a massive issue [as we wrote before]. One festival which was one of the first to shout they will go ahead with rapid testing is Unum Festival in Albania. They’ve now teamed up with Swallow Events and Yoti to bring their audience a home test. Moreover, the results of this test will be hosted on a blockchain. A verification model that could, potentially, alleviate some security concerns.

Now what?

The answer to this question depends on whether you think global or local. If you’re living in a country that has either done well on actively preventing the spread of the coronavirus in the first place, or in a country that does well with its vaccination program there’s light at the end of the tunnel. If you live in a country where the opposites are true, it’s a very different picture. So what to do?

On the one hand, I want to call out to governments to pinch through ‘status-quo bias‘ and assess local initiatives carefully and at face value. To let go of what has become the ‘pandemic-normal’ and look for a ‘post-pandemic-normal’ that will allow music – and culture in general – to bloom again.

On the other hand, I want to call out to organizers to look beyond themselves and take into account a global picture. Live events in isolation might be possible, but if we’ve learned one thing in the last year it’s that we don’t live in isolation from each other.

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.

Is killing privacy the best we can do against secondary ticketing?

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

In its push to become a data-driven business, event organisers smell opportunity by connecting ticketing to real identities.

It’s estimated that the market for secondary ticketing is worth $1bn in the UK alone. It’s a problem for fans and artists, since tickets are often bought in bulk by resellers and sold at a much higher rate to fans. None of that added margin goes to the artists (although there are some allegations…).

Recently, Iron Maiden opted to go ‘paperless’ for their UK arena tour in order to curb ticket touting. With success:

“In 2010, 6,294 tickets appeared overnight on three of the major resale platforms — Viagogo, Seatwave and Get Me In! — on the day of sale. In 2016 this had dropped to 207, all on Viagogo, as Live Nation/Ticketmaster had agreed delist the tour at Iron Maiden’s request.”

The tour didn’t go fully paperless, and paper tickets were available, but came with strict requirements towards the fans:

  1. Tickets must carry the name of the purchaser;
  2. Ticketholder must present ID and credit card at the door.

While effective, this is worrying and certainly not a “victory for concertgoers” as Iron Maiden manager Rob Smallwood called it.

It’s not just ticketing: privacy is under attack from all fronts. Many events have decided to go ‘cashless’, requiring people to top up chips in special event wristbands. This way, you know exactly who is ordering what, where, how much, and at what time of the night. If you’re a large organisation like Live Nation, you can build up an extensive profile of users over time.

Valuable data, which may help secure sponsors for alcoholic beverages and helps you to target fans with specific offers, but that data comes with a great responsibility.

Privacy in the age of artificial intelligence

The first multi-day conference and festival I attended that was nearly completely cashless was Eurosonic Noorderslag, earlier this year. It’s a music business conference and showcase event, and has lots of bands playing every night in nearly every bar and club in its host city, Groningen, in The Netherlands. It presented cashless payments as a convenience (ie. to reduce queues at bars).

I immediately researched ways to opt-out and found no good way. It was possible to ‘anonimize’ your chip, but you still have to charge it with your bank card, which ties your identity to it through the transaction records. I had good reason to opt-out and so do you.

On its own, “Bas entered venue X at 21:03 and drank a beer at bar Y at 21:24” seems like useless information. And it probably is. I’m not from a country or culture that frowns upon alcohol, so I’m unlikely to be blackmailed with such a bit of information. However, it is possible for someone to claim they met me there and try to pull some sort of scam. Or worse, for someone to claim they are me by using anecdotal evidence based on these random bits of data, and then scamming someone else.

Criminals are moving from the higher risk ‘traditional crime’ into ‘cybercrime’ which is perceived as lower risk.

More than how someone might use a specific data point, what we should really be worried about is larger data leaks. There are parties that try to collect all information from big leaks. Some use it for good, like Have I Been Pwned, where you can search your email address to see if your login info of any site has leaked. But some people store it for more malicious purposes.

Over time, patterns can emerge in these data sets. These become easier to identify through machine learning algorithms, which can go through large datasets faster than a person could, and can get better over time at making sense of data. Many great ones are open source, like Google’s TensorFlow.

Now, your attendance of live events and what exactly you do there can be tied to your hacked LinkedIn or Dropbox account. Whoever holds that data has power over you.

Artificial intelligence could be trained to send hypertargeted scam emails, which use all the data available about you to trick you. This could result in ransomware being installed on your computer, which often means your hard drive is encrypted and locked and the key to decrypt your data is only turned over after paying a certain fee (usually done through Bitcoin, which makes it harder to track the perpetrators).

This could happen to your phone, but also to your car, or any other devices which are likely to be connected to the internet in a few years from now.

The important take-away is that the more data someone has about you, the wider their ‘attack vector’ becomes. This means they have more paths to target you. Any data point on its own usually doesn’t have much value, but it’s when large amounts of data get combined that value emerges. Facebook, a data company, has a market cap of nearly $400bn.

Privacy is security

Privacy in music should not be an afterthought

We have learned a lot from events. We’ve learned not to use biker gangs for security. We’ve learned to have first aid staff at festivals that are trained to dealing with the effects of alcohol poisoning and mishaps with drugs. We have come a long way to providing experiences that are exciting and safe at the same time.

Now it’s time to worry about our guests’ safety before they arrive, and after they leave our events. Let me be clear:

  • If you request your guests to sacrifice their privacy for ‘convenience’, and you get hacked, leading to people getting blackmailed or scammed, it is YOUR responsibility;
  • If you request this data from guests, make it clear and easy for them to find out how you’re storing the data, what you’re using it for, and when it will be deleted. Don’t just refer to some boilerplate privacy policy full of legalese;
  • When things go wrong, be honest about it and communicate it immediately, so people can take security measures;
  • Never store data about people for longer than you need it. Not storing data is the best way to prevent it from being leaked.

(small sidenote: if anyone ever sent you a picture or scan of their passport, go delete that file and email now)

What can you do as a fan?

Do whatever best protects your privacy. If it feels like you’re being a pain in the ass by requesting an anonimized wristband, great. You should be a pain in the ass. Pain is a great motivator for change. So by all means, request information about how your data is stored and protected, how long it’s stored, for what purpose, etc.

Perhaps the hardest part is willing to skip concerts that don’t have privacy-friendly options. As a consumer we should understand that solving ticket touting by sacrificing guests’ privacy is not a solution. It just shifts the issue and places an additional cost on the consumer on top of the ticket price.

Event organisers need to find a way to mitigate or at the very least minimize that additional cost. This means ticketing organisations have to take measures to invest in technology which helps protect and secure guests’ privacy. But they need to feel pressure, or pain, in order to that.

Data, for ticketing companies, is the same as it is for malicious hackers: the more data you can get on a person, the more valuable it becomes.