On April 10, Phoebe Bridgers sat in her Los Angeles apartment in her pajamas, with a guitar across her lap and her head cocked quizzically to the side, staring into her phone’s camera. “I’ve never done this before,” the 25-year-old singer-songwriter said, strumming her Danelectro. “How are you guys? Is this, like, a normal angle? Is this good? Can you hear me?”
And with that, Bridgers embarked upon what has become practically a rite of passage for musicians living through the global coronavirus pandemic: the shaky first livestream.
Nearly 10,000 fans watched her 30-minute performance on Pitchfork’s Instagram, for free. “I’ve never played a show to 10,000 people before, but it’s hard to feel like that’s happening when you’re alone in your house and there isn’t crowd response,” Bridgers said during a phone interview in late May. “You’re like, ‘I feel like an idiot. I’m just playing in my house, talking to myself.’ It’s very weird.”
It’s a weirdness artists and fans have become intimately familiar with. Since the concert industry shut down in mid-March, the livestream has become ubiquitous. Diplo performed from his dimly lit living room floor. John Legend took requests on Instagram Live in his bathrobe. Keith Urban played in his warehouse with his wife, Nicole Kidman, dancing in and out of the frame.
The format has evolved quickly and somewhat haphazardly, but, generally, there’s been an observable developmental timeline. At first, the streams were mostly free — with the main goal simply to ease both artists’ and fans’ nerves — or they were for charity, soliciting tips to raise money for aid groups. After a few weeks of streams with rudimentary production values, they got more ambitious, and some were embellished with better lighting and multiple camera angles.
Though artists initially gravitated toward familiar social media platforms like YouTube, Instagram Live or Facebook Live, they soon started making the leap to online stages fans may not have heard of before. Some, like Erykah Badu, built their own platforms. Venues started hosting livestreams, and media organizations like Billboard, NPR and Pitchfork got in on the act. Even retailers Urban Outfitters and Navy Exchange started doing them.
As the pandemic has stretched on, and it’s become clear that concerts full of tightly packed fans won’t be returning in a significant way until 2021, there’s new pressure on these streams, and new questions about them: Can the technology be improved? Can the streams edge closer to the experience of a real show — with fans interacting with each other, paying for better views or more access? Can artists adjust to playing to a screen, rather than a crowd of screaming fans?
And, perhaps most critically: Will people pay for them?
When the pandemic first hit, companies already working to make livestreams more polished had largely struggled to gain traction. The shutdown of the concert industry changed that. Stageit, a livestreaming platform begun in 2011, saw such a surge after the coronavirus lockdown that its payment processors initially suspected fraud.
“We were doing numbers in days that we were doing in months before,” said Stageit’s founder, Evan Lowenstein.
Topeka, a company that charges fans for bespoke mini-concerts, Q. and A. sessions and other encounters via Zoom calls with artists like Joshua Radin and the Indigo Girls’ Emily Saliers, started in December. “Our biggest issue then was how are we going to tell people what Zoom is,” said its founder, Andy Levine.
Since mid-March, the company has expanded from one employee to 10. On July 7, Topeka livestreamed a “front row experience” for a Jason Isbell show, during which 150 fans paid $100 per stream to see and be seen by Isbell, mimicking some of the interactive qualities of a real concert. The event was recorded and will be offered later to more than 2,000 fans at $25 at ticket on July 23. “This is a first step for us to figure out a way for the artist to feel energy coming back, and for people watching to feel it,” Levine said.
The rapid expansion and experimentation can make the livestreaming landscape feel a bit like the Wild West. Livestreaming has become a catchall designation that refers to a dizzying array of content: solo home videos; concerts staged in empty venues; Instagram series like Verzuz, where artists alternate spinning their own tracks in back-and-forth battles; free-form Zoom calls with fans,; E.D.M. D.J.s on turntables in vacant rooms; performances in video games like Minecraft and Fortnite, and immersive experiences powered by virtual reality technology.
The experience for performers can be disorienting. “The Pavlovian response for the past 23 years is you finish a song and whatever number of people are in the room clap for you,” said Ben Gibbard, the Death Cab for Cutie frontman, who livestreamed from his home regularly from mid-March through May. “I’ve gotten used to that being the validation.”
Efforts to take advantage of technology that artists themselves may not be entirely comfortable with can be predictably hit-and-miss. The veteran R&B producer Teddy Riley did his first livestream in early April from his home studio, along with members of his group, Blackstreet. A local company set up multiple cameras, and the show was streamed over several platforms including Omnis, Vuuzle and Pluto TV. But despite the generally crisp quality of the stream, Riley felt a disconnect.
“When you go, ‘Say ho!’ and you’re trying to get crowd participation, you’re just hoping that somebody is in their home saying, ‘ho!’” he said.
Artists have often found themselves groping toward a simulacrum of their normal concert experience. Brad Paisley’s first livestream on March 19 was self-shot to Instagram Live, but since then, the multiplatinum country star has performed with bandmates, all socially distanced in different parts of his home; he’s done Zoom calls with fans; and in May, he performed his full stage show at the Steel Mill, a rehearsal space outside Nashville.
“The house concerts were charming but odd,” said Paisley. “There’s my dad with one iPad and my wife with another, staring at me. She’s wincing as I have an awkward moment.”
It took three days for Paisley’s mask-and-glove-clad crew to set up the Steel Mill stage, a process that normally takes six hours. “It was like doing calculus,” he said. “If we got this wrong and there were 50 new Covid cases due to our negligence, that’d be it for these.” Doing the full show though, “felt like every live TV concert we’ve ever done, other than the lack of people sitting there watching.”
Bud Light, which has sponsored numerous shows, including ones for the bachata superstars Aventura and the pop singer-songwriter Charlie Puth, did the same for Paisley’s event, enabling him to offer the livestream for free. “We wanted to show that other than the silence between songs, it could feel like a concert,” he said. “Monetizing it could come later.”
Pre-pandemic, live music was one of the industry’s few financially robust sectors, so its disappearance has been crippling. According to one poll, 90 percent of independent venue owners predict they’ll have to shut down completely by the fall without a federal bailout or some other income source. In April, Pollstar estimated that worldwide ticket revenue would tumble by about 75 percent, or $8.9 billion if concerts didn’t return in 2020.
Whether livestreams can spawn a reliable business model to help replace this revenue — for artists and for the industry — may be the most difficult question to answer. The country’s largest concert promoter, Live Nation, which furloughed 20 percent of its staff as part of a $600 million cost-cutting effort, has been aggregating artists’ free livestreams on its website, and planning for more highly produced fan-less concerts that could generate revenue through advertising or ticket sales. But expectations are modest.
“We’re never going to replace, through digital, the emotional connection an artist has with their fans,” said Kevin Chernett, Live Nation’s executive video president of global partnerships and content distribution. “I don’t think we’re going to replace all the touring revenue. But we’re certainly willing to find out a tolerance level and interest from fans to see where it goes.”
Many in the industry have worked, quite sensibly, on establishing a decent livestreaming product before asking fans to pay for it. For Digital Mirage, a virtual electronic music festival first held in early April, the performers, including Kaskade, A-Trak and Flosstradamus, played for free, while viewer donations raised $300,000 for the Sweet Relief Musicians Fund. The festival’s second run, in mid-June, was also a free livestream that raised money for social justice causes through a virtual tip jar. According to Blake Coppelson, one of Digital Mirage’s organizers, for the festival’s next iteration, “we can potentially charge.”
But as the music industry has learned, convincing consumers to pay for something they’ve previously gotten for free can be challenging. Ben Baruch, who runs the 11E1even Group, a management company that represents jam bands, began organizing Live from Out There, a recurring virtual festival, days after the nationwide lockdown went into effect. “We needed a system to put money in everybody’s pocket versus go free and then try to work backwards,” he said.
Using multiple paid ticketing and subscription options, the festival, which ran across 10 weekends between mid-March and early June, grossed more than $700,000. “We did see scenarios where people actually made more money than they might’ve on tour.”
Other livestreaming platforms have seen similarly impressive returns. According to Levine, one artist made close to $25,000 on Topeka, putting in about 10 hours a week for six weeks in April and May. “This is no paying your band, no overhead and you get to stay in your own bed,” Levine said.
But artists who normally make their living on the road may face bigger obstacles in this new abnormal. “A rock band with a slightly older audience, those audiences are less rabid from an online engagement perspective,” said Steve Bursky, the founder of Foundations Music, a management company whose clients include Foy Vance, Young the Giant and Lauv. “The irony is younger, pop-leaning acts who don’t require being on the road a lot, there’s more of an appetite from that audience. They’ve livestreamed content for years.”
Finding the sweet spot between what fans are willing to pay and what artists need to charge to make it profitable continues to be tricky. The veteran rapper Murs has been livestreaming for years, mostly via the gaming platform Twitch, but admitted that, despite the post-lockdown uptick, it’s been “a grind.” He’s on Twitch for two hours a day, six days a week, mostly freestyling. He’s also been doing periodic concerts from home for subscribers to his account on Patreon, a platform for fans to directly pay content creators. Still, his livestreaming income hasn’t approached what he’d make on the road.
“If I had to depend on Twitch and Patreon, I’d be lost right now,” he said. Watching his fellow rappers livestream for free though is frustrating. “Most rappers aren’t looking for ways to connect to fans or monetize, they’re just starved for attention, so something like IG Live works for them. I love Verzuz, but why aren’t you all on Twitch trying to monetize this? You’re giving Instagram everything for free.”
Stageit’s Lowenstein, a singer-songwriter himself, has been evangelical about musicians not giving away content: “I’m concerned about what that does to artists that really need the money.”
The tension is difficult to resolve. The artists livestreaming for free or shaking a tip jar for charity are often the ones who can afford to, and who feel, justifiably, that charging fans money during these grave times feels bad and looks worse. At the same time, all these livestreams are competing for viewers’ limited time, so a high-profile artist offering free content deflates the market for anyone else hoping — and needing — to make money.
In mid-March, Rhett Miller, the 49-year-old frontman for the alt-country outfit the Old 97s, began regularly livestreaming shows via Stageit from his home office in New Paltz, N.Y. Fans pay what they want — the suggested price is $9.70 per show — and he gives some proceeds to charity but can’t afford to give it all.
“When I was looking at a year-plus of no income, it was terrifying,” he said. “I thought this thing I’ve been doing for 35 years was over. I was convinced I was going to have to figure out a new job.” The most lucrative of his livestreams earns him what he’d normally make for a solo acoustic show. “I get that it feels weird to be pushing people for money, and it’s not without a little guilt that I’m able to replace my lost income via these shows, but it’s [expletive] magical that this has shaken out.”
Going forward, the recognition that livestreams can be more than just poorly produced home gigs feels significant. “If you just play shows and charge, I think the novelty will wear off,” said Jonathan Daniel, the co-owner of Crush, a management company that represents Green Day, Weezer and Sia. “Figuring out what the medium works for is key. It’s a good creative lesson. Different things work for different people.”
The English singer-songwriter Laura Marling sold 5,500 tickets to two livestreams in June from Union Chapel, a grand 19th century London cathedral. The shows were geo-blocked, meaning one was available only to U.K.-based fans, the other to those in North America. Ticket sales were capped to help stir demand. The resulting revenue won’t cover all of Marling’s canceled shows, but that was never the point.
“The shows are just an experimental novelty,” she said. “Somebody will figure out a way to make them not just a novelty in the future. But right now, that’s all they are.”
Other artists have started to create entire virtual tours, with each show geo-blocked and therefore available for streaming only to fans in a particular city or region. DICE, the digital ticketing company Marling used, is working on software that will enable friends to buy tickets to a livestream together and have their own private chat room at the show. “For fans in different places across the globe to be able to unite at any show and have that interaction, that’s amazing,” said Marling.
In July, Rave Family Block Fest, a four-day electronic music festival featuring more than 900 artists took place inside Minecraft, with ticket prices starting at $10. A company called Wave, which uses motion-capture technology to turn artists into digital avatars and stage virtual concerts, recently raised $30 million in venture capital funding.
Some of these ideas will flourish. Others won’t. But for all the frustration, terror and boredom the pandemic has stoked, “I haven’t hated some of the creativity it’s caused. ”as Paisley put it,
Livestreaming may be an inelegant, unsatisfying remedy for live music’s absence, but there’s widespread acknowledgment that, for now, it’s what we’ve got. “I feel for this industry because we’ve got to limp to the finish here,” he said. “The problem is we don’t know when the finish is.”
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Concerts Aren’t Back. Livestreams Are Ubiquitous. Can They Do the Job? - The New York Times
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