Tag: livestreaming

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.

Livestream monetization strategies, or what we can learn from Inter Miami CF

Posted on | by Maarten Walraven-Freeling

How we monetize fandom in an increasingly online world is a question that doesn’t just exist in music, but also in sports. As such we can learn from each other. Brand new American football club Inter Miami just launched a video strategy that is all about engagement. Let’s see what they’re doing, how they do it, and what it means for those monetization strategies. But first

Some background into US sports on TV

In the US, sports on TV is having a hard time of it. Its ratings having been decreasing for years with a hard slump during the pandemic. Taking the Major League Baseball as a quick example this is what that decline looks like:

Taken from sportsnaut

There are some signs that viewership for sports in the US will stabilize and, as The Hollywood Reporter recently reported, TV networks on the one hand have too much money – roughly $140 billion – invested in sports over the course of the next 10 years. On the other hand, shrinking overall TV subscribers may make sports’ appointment viewing even more valuable. At the same time, shifting audiences will require changes in how live sports will be offered. There are already some examples that try to incorporate other franchises, such as Star Wars or Marvel, into the live broadcast. But other experiments are more interesting to analyse from a music perspective.

The Inter Miami case

A totally new football club dreamed up by David Beckham, perhaps it’s not strange that they also think about branding like Beckham. Last week, the club released an app, which they dub ‘an immersive fan video engagement experience.‘

What fans get

  • Watch Party, viewing with up to 8 people
  • Live chat, with co-viewers
  • Real-time stats, directly on screen
  • Social engagement, focuses on being to share and like while staying with the live video of the game

Many of these elements resemble things that already exist in other live video spaces such as games like Fortnite, streaming services like Twitch, and SVOD services like Disney+. While I’m most excited about the watch party integration, it’s actually the combination of elements that music should look at when it comes to livestreaming, the total package that will help fuel a collective watching experience. This type of live and simulaneous watching is also YouTube‘s number one highlight from their recent Culture and Trends Report.

Inter Miami partnered with a company called StreamLayer on the app. Just last summer, they raised $4 million and their unique selling point is that they create overlays on any video stream. Their first focus is on mobile, because “the proclivity on mobile to interact is just dramatically higher,” as Head of Product Strategy Tim Ganschow told Forbes. The next step will focus on connected, or smart, TVs, which is also an exciting space for music.

Monetization strategies

Interaction and engagement are the key elements of this new football viewing experience. Those are two elements that musicians on Twitch or StageIt, for example, have also learned to utilize and control. However, the watch party element is something that can come in and make a big change for music livestreaming, especially when it comes to monetization. There could be, for example, ‘normal’ tickets, but also ‘watch-party’ tickets that allow you to set up a room with up to 8 friends. This wouldn’t be too dissimilar to group tickets for festivals.

Besides thinking about bringing in extra revenues through a variety of tickets, there are many more possibilities. Overlays present opportunities to show sponsors in a livestream without the need to cut out the live video. Or, it’s possible to do direct merch calls directly related to what’s happening in the livestream. Of course, the livestream itself would need to be unique and different to create interesting moments to print on a t-shirt or mint into an NFT and, most importantly, to warrant interest from fans.

In sum

We need to keep thinking about new ways to create more interactive and engaging livestreams. One way to do so is to look at what others do and develop. Just like StreamLayer looked at Twitch and tried to bring more engagement into sports livestreaming, so musicians, managers, labels, venues, and platforms can look at Inter Miami’s app and copy the watch party. Moreover, these types of developments will continue to give livestreaming a differentiating edge against in-person concerts. Novel ways to connect, interact and engage with fellow fans will be one way to keep people at home with their screen instead of in a venue or at a festival.

Livestream tech breaking down

Posted on | by Maarten Walraven-Freeling

We don’t hear about the livestreams that don’t go well so much. However, technology breaks down and breaks down quite often. This can happen to an artist playing a Twitch show for 50 people, but also to Glastonbury and Driift working on one of the biggest livestream events of the year.

Glastonbury’s Live at Worthy Farm event included lots of great artists and a special appearance by The Smile, the new band including Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood. Lots of people, who had bought tickets, couldn’t make it into the livestream. The problem was that lots of the unique ticket codes were flagged as invalid. After almost two hours the solution was to remove the paywall to the event. And since the event was live-to-tape instead of actually live, viewers were also able to rewind for example.

Even livestreaming events that received universal praise suffered their share of issues for individual viewers.

And while individual cases can be just that, an individual’s connection that is problematic, lag created by some error on a laptop or phone, etc. the technological problems are always below the surface.

It’s just too busy

The most common trope surrounding the failure of livestreaming is to do with traffic. Servers need to handle a lot of people entering a virtual door and getting their ticket verified. Two major examples come with Justin Bieber‘s New Year’s Eve livestream and Marc Anthony‘s ‘Una Noche’ livestream from 17 April. The former’s livestream overloaded because 1.2 million T-Mobile users showed up having mostly bought their tickets on the last day. The company hosting the livestream, VenewLive isn’t new to big number of visitors having been set up by a combination of HYBE, Universal, and Kiswe. But just like you have to wait at an arena sometimes, so servers can overload due to high demand. Similarly, with Una Noche, demand seemed to outstretch capacity. In a great article in Billboard, there are two stories: 1) again, lots of people bought tickets at the last moment causing server undercapacity; 2) too many people used the same codes causing the system to crash. Either way, it has led the livestream platform Maestro to change its policy and only host shows that run through their own ticketing platform.

The fix

There’s an easy answer to this problem: a cap on tickets sold. StageIt‘s Stephen White told me that they actively encourage artists and bands to put a maximum amount of tickets per show. This allows for good preparation in terms of what kind of server capacity will allow shows to run smoothly. Of course, it also creates a sense of scarcity. And, indeed, StageIt sees a more even tickets-sold ratio across the period that those tickets are on sale and less last-minute buying then reported for Bieber and Anthony.

Another option is to scale your server capacity, which means you probably have to work with one of the major cloud services such as AWS or Google Cloud. These companies have vast options available to scale server capacity. AWS has an auto-scaling functionality, while Google Cloud allows for automatic load balancing to allow for heavy, unexpected, traffic. The problem here, of course, is that this doesn’t come cheap. The more power and capacity you use, the more you pay. Whether the ticket prices will still cover this is something you want to know in advance and not be faced with last minute or even the day after.

A third option is to use an existing platform that knows how to deal with audiences at scale. Dedicated music livestreaming platforms like VenewLive, StageIt and Maestro – and their are dozens more – are great in terms of offering specific functionalities, such as integrated merch sales, and closed, ticketed, environments. Platforms like YouTube and Twitch already have so much traffic moving through them that any spike from even the largest livestreams won’t impact the overall computational capacity too significantly. They also have other advantages such as different direct payment options, suc as tipping and channel subscriptions. Of course, this is different than buying a ticket, but for artists who aren’t at the level of Marc Anthony or Billie Eilish it might make sense to drive users not to a ticket but to another method of payment. Going back to StageIt, they find that most artists get the highest return not with a set ticket price but with a pay-what-you-can model.

We won’t shake off these issues

I’m a strong believer that livestreaming is here to stay, especially if done well. By that, I mean that the experience of a livestream should be different from that of a gig in a venue. Instead of just pointing cameras at a stage, livestreams should offer viewers a unique experience that feels like it’s made just for them instead of for hundreds of people at once. To achieve this, it makes a lot of sense to use a different platform than YouTube or Twitch, to partner with a provider that makes it their business to create something bespoke. Take to Twitch for a quick and dirty livestream of you or your band in the studio, but make sure to create something with added value if you ask people to pay for a ticket.

The livestream-specific platforms may be more limited in terms of capacity and potentially have other technical limitations. However, these issues will remain as long as livestream. Best thing to do then, is to try and stay in control – as evidenced by Maestro’s reaction to the failed Marc Anthony livestream – and to prepare well. The latter probably means you want to cap your crowd so you know exactly how much server capacity you require. And, finally, let’s make sure we talk about the failures and learn from them. Not all news about livestreams has to be rosy, it’s also okay to tell the world something went wrong.

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.

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.

What to watch out for in 2021: scarcity models, return to live, and sustainability

Posted on | by Bas Grasmayer

MUSIC x focuses on long-term thinking about music & surrounding industries, so instead of looking back at the year we’re taking a look at trends we expect to be influential in the coming months with regards to tech, the pandemic, and sustainability. Here’s what to watch out for in 2021.

This article is jointly written by Bas Grasmayer and Maarten Walraven-Freeling.

Tech: Scarcity

Music was once a scarce good; the only way to experience it was live. Throughout the twentieth century technological developments have driven music from scarce to ubiquitous:

  • The inventions related to recorded sound go back to the late-nineteenth century and the patent for the first gramophone disc stems from 1887. It wasn’t until the 1920s that recording techniques changed to make it easier to record music and this helped the spread of music beyond the live experience. It also spurred on the music industry as we know it today.
  • Moreover, the 1920s saw the advent of radio which brought recorded music into most homes. Not only did this broaden the scope of the audience for music, the medium also influenced the format of music itself and the popularity of it and its performers. Fan culture was born.
  • Of course, radio was thought to kill the phonograph industry. But it didn’t. The equipment used for radio broadcast helped to improve recording standards for music and with it the sale of records which doubled from around 100 million in 1921 to 200 million in 1929. 
  • We jump to the 1950s and the rise of television and film. New opportunities first and foremost for composers and musicians to find new revenue streams. But, of course, this new medium was thought to kill the old radio industry. Again, it didn’t. Fan culture got a massive boost.
  • The trend continued into the broader acceptance of video and the rise of MTV in the 1980s. Video killed the radio star may be a popular song, but it didn’t happen. The age of the CD broke and recorded music industry revenues grew astronomically. More people got access to more and more music. 
  • 1999, Napster. The internet did actually nearly kill the recorded music industry. Suddenly, all music was available for free at everyone’s keyboard-fingertips. The response? All bets on ubiquity: From the failed early experiments of the major labels through YouTube to Spotify. Music is everywhere and we, the listener and fan, expect to have it all, always. 
  • For more than 100 years the music industry has been on a wave towards ubiquity with technological innovations as a catalyst forever thought to do more harm than good. Moving into the third decade of the twenty-first century, in order to maintain growth, we’ll need to jump on the scarcity wave.

Where to find scarcity?

How many people, publications, musicians, labels, etc. do you directly support? How many in 2018? How many right now? It’s likely you support a few and that this number has grown in the past three years. To keep you supporting you’re usually given access to exclusive content. In other words, exclusive content = stickiness. 

This year, the virtual Music Tectonics conference provided a couple of days of being online together with some of the frontrunners in music and tech and you would have been forgiven if you came away thinking direct-to-fan is what everybody does. This isn’t true yet, but it has grown significantly in 2020. Three things to keep an eye on:

Equity investment

From major players such as BTS’ label Big Hit Entertainment going public and the ARMY taking a stake in their own fandom to something like Bumper Collective which allows fans to buy a stake in the future royalties of their favourite artists’ music. This investment idea – and subsequently the idea behind all the major catalogue acquisitions of 2020 – comes from the belief that the music streaming economy will grow. More and more people will become a part of the music industry of ubiquity, but that also provides opportunities around the scarcity of ownership. 

Non-fungible tokens

In our recent update on blockchain in 2020 we dove into so-called ‘NFTs’. One week later, a digital artwork by Beeple sold for $777,777 on Nifty Gateway, a platform that makes it possible to own digital goods, making them scarce again. Days later, rapper Lil Yachty sold a digital collectible for $16,050 through the same platform. While earlier auctioned collectibles relied on being physical, such as the infamous single-copy Wu-Tang Clan album purchased by Martin Shkreli (the story of which is being turned into a movie on Netflix), the phenomenon has now gone digital.

Gated content

When Cardi B signed up to OnlyFans earlier this year, she announced it would be a place for only her and her fans. While doing stuff out in the open may get you fans and makes it easy for people to spread the word, gating content allows fans to feel like they’re accessing or are part of something special and helps the artist feel like they’re talking to their ‘true fans’. Cardi B and OnlyFans are far from the only examples. Membership models are rising in popularity through Patreon, Substack, and good old YouTube, among many others. If 2020 didn’t do so already, 2021 will see membership access models for artists go mainstream.

Corona: live/stream

Andrea and Virginia Bocelli during Believe in Christmas
Andrea Bocelli’s Believe in Christmas livestream

The pandemic and the enforced lockdowns have accelerated many changes that were already bubbling right underneath the surface of the music industry for years. None of these accelerations went faster than with livestreaming. While the live music industry was decimated, livestreaming took centre stage. At first most everything was free and poorly produced but that thankfully changed and we’re now faced with ticketed events of high production value from major artists like Dua Lipa, Billie Eilish and BTS. Similarly, there are artists who started going live often with good productions and on a subscription basis (exhibit A being Melissa Etheridge) leaning hard into their superfans. Meanwhile, the return to live seems to creep further into 2021 as we flow from lockdown to lockdown. With the vaccines, there will surely be live concerts as we head into the second half of 2021 but how will they be organised? Thus, the double-headed beast of live, streaming events and in-person events, is the trend coming through pandemic 2021. 

The livestream will develop into an ever more interactive medium, both for fans and artists. There will be more productions that will include elements like BTS’ geotagged lightstick, the ARMY BOMB, during their Bang Bang Con virtual concert. Similarly, the way Billie Eilish provided engagement even the day before the show and pulled up 500 fans during one song as they were watching from behind their screen will be further developed to enhance interactions between artist and audience. Once live music returns these livestream events will remain a staple of the touring artist. Take, as an example, the Genesis Reunion tour, postponed twice due to the pandemic and now scheduled to start in April 2021. Let’s imagine for a moment this tour will go ahead, but the band has no interest in touring beyond the UK and Ireland. One full month of touring and most of the world is left without an option to attend. They can decide to bring a full camera and production crew to one of their gigs and film the whole thing as is. The other option is to take one extra date, create something more interactive and bring that as a live event around the world. Instead of 18 months of touring the globe, the band can perform once and â€˜tour’ from one geofenced url to the next. This will be attractive to artists not eager to tour full time and to fans who are traditionally in geographical locations where most touring musicians don’t visit.

Pandemic, or even epidemic, in-person concerts will see new hygiene regimes enter the everyday vocabulary for concert- and festival-goers. We’ve reported before about the scientific trials taking place in Germany, the Netherlands, and Spain, among others. What these show is that a combination of rapid testing, staggered entry, mask-wearing, ventilation, and protocols pertaining to movement will become normal. You won’t have to decide whether you want to watch the support act, instead you’ll arrive at a very specific time to be able to enter a venue. Tickets will become just that little bit more expensive as the cost of the rapid test will be included in the price. It will be a long slog and hard work to put these types of events on and to attend them, perhaps also to perform them.

And, of course, tours could get cancelled. How the risk of cancellation will be attributed will be a spearpoint for 2021: artist, promotor, venue? What role will governments play? One of the reasons everything has been postponed is that this has deferred the losses that would have come from cancelling. At what point, however, will it become impossible to postpone a tour – again? As these risks become real as the year advances more governments will step in to make sure venues, promotors and artists alike will feel safe to plan events (Germany leading the way again). This type of risk deferral will look different for major artists and companies like Live Nation and AEG than for smaller artists and independent venues and promotors. The former rely on more long-term planning and have access to different types of funding (see AEG’s staff cuts and its owner’s loan). They will certainly be able to hold out one way or another until live and in-person events return. Smaller artists and independent venues will depend more heavily on support structures, both from governments and fundraising activities.

Sustainability: think local

European Commission Executive Vice-President for the European Green Deal, Frans Timmermans.

Will sustainability be on anyone’s priority list in 2021 as many feel they’re making up for lost time, and revenue? Hard to answer, but it absolutely should be as our environmental crises are of an order of magnitude disproportionate to one pandemic. No music on a dead planet, as they say. Before the pandemic broke out, climate and the environment in general had a lot of momentum as topics in popular culture. This was, in part, due to movements like Extinction Rebellion and Fridays For Future, the latter of which spawned movements of school kids protesting weekly in countless cities all over the world. The latter has largely moved their protests online, while also trying to figure out pandemic-friendly protests offline that can easily be amplified through social media. While this cultural force has become momentarily less visible, it’s ready to mobilize as soon as it’s possible again.

While you can find an overview of initiatives and resources regarding this topic on MUSIC x GREEN, what we think you should be watching out for next year is the following:

Regional collaboration between the music sector, government, and other industries.

In many countries, but more specifically cities, we’ve been seeing various levels of cooperation and coordination between the music sector and (local) governments & institutions. This can be over restrictions and limitations, corona-proofing venues, scientific experiments, layoffs & furloughing, or bureaucratic aspects like insurances and cancellation. This relation should be preserved coming out of the pandemic in order to drive positive change around music & sustainability.

A prime example of this is Massive Attack’s work on decarbonising live music and coming to the conclusion that the primary partner for this are cities, rather than promoters or venues, because it’s about transport infrastructure, power, and waste. For this type of innovation & problem-solving, live events can be useful trials (as we’ve highlighted before). This echoes some of the thoughts put forth by Shain Shapiro, founder of Sound Diplomacy. In a multi-part series, Shapiro points out new trends in localism such as the 15-minute city and the fact that the music sector is as organised as it’s even been. Those are two very important ingredients to actionable change. While change is also anticipated in other areas, such as more artists employing more circular models for their merchandise, 2021 will be a year of disruption with a local focus being an easy way to counter risks, and an important opportunity for bringing about sustainable change.