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

• Lights were done inside the Nouvelle Belgique venue by the light technicians of the Ancienne Belgique

• 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.

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.