With no return date for shows in sight, fans and artists are adapting to a new way of experiencing music together. Whether it’ll keep everyone satisfied — and paid — is still unclear.
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.
