It began with easy nostalgia. Within the wake of the pandemic, Craig Powers, a 38-year-old researcher from Tacoma, rediscovered his love for his favourite bands and albums. However as Powers dove deeper and deeper into the music world, he discovered himself not solely returning to beloved artists, however discovering new music and albums. This was largely because of TikTok, which always served him live performance clips of stylistically adjoining musicians by way of his feed, a broad swath of emo, metalcore, and post-punk artists.
On the peak of this new/previous obsession, nevertheless, Powers realized a grim reality about social media: Watching bands on TikTok didn’t put cash in these artists’ pockets, and streaming residuals are so paltry that listening to albums on Spotify or YouTube wasn’t sufficient. If Powers needed to help all the brand new bands he was into, he couldn’t simply watch live performance clips on his feed: He wanted to go to the live shows themselves.
So Powers, who tells me he by no means does “something half-assed,” began out 2023 with a aim of seeing 30 live shows earlier than the tip of the 12 months. The journey he launched into led him to recapture his love of stay music, uncover much more bands, and hit his aim far sooner than he anticipated: He took in live performance quantity 30, Weezer, final month. And naturally, he documented all of it on TikTok, the place all of it started.
Powers isn’t the one particular person whose relationship to stay leisure has modified profoundly lately. The age of streaming media has introduced with it elevated entry to live performance footage, front-row fancams, and extremely mobilized fanbases who strategy the whole lot concerning the live performance season prefer it’s their job. From shopping for tickets (good luck) to prepping for the massive night time by rigorously planning the right live performance outfit, these followers do all of it — and lots of of them do it on digital camera, sharing the entire expertise with different die-hards on-line.
Clearly we’re in a brand new period of live performance media — and as with all eras, we’ve each gained and misplaced a little bit alongside the best way.
These aren’t your mother’s bootlegs
Throughout an enormous vary of genres from Okay-pop to hardcore, streaming and sharing platforms like TikTok and Instagram are altering the best way individuals take into consideration streamed live performance footage and viral moments from a stay occasion. The savviest artists not solely know that their viewers may have their telephones out, however anticipate it. Final 12 months, Rosalía and TikTok collectively earned a Latin Grammy nomination for a music movie stuffed with bite-size, clippable moments, all filmed on cell phones, that aired stay on the platform. And Taylor Swift simply introduced the discharge of a whole film of her already-legendary Eras tour — conveniently dropping earlier than the European leg of that tour kicks off.
Livestreamed and social media-boosted live performance clips have turn into so ubiquitous that it’s jarring to look again and keep in mind that for many of the web’s historical past, filming live shows in any respect was verboten. Blogs like NYC Taper and BB Chronicles, alongside an infinite rotation of torrent servers, specialised in sharing live performance clips and archiving bootleg recordings of classic live shows. The web site Relisten focuses on curating a lot of the stay live performance footage shared on the Web Archive throughout many years — the whole lot from the Grateful Lifeless to bluegrass band Trampled by Turtles. The undertone of all these web sites boils all the way down to “please don’t sue us”; many of those blogs embody disclaimers stressing that their collections are supposed to complement, not exchange, the stay live performance expertise.
This shamefaced, don’t-ask-don’t-tell strategy to bootlegging live shows has lengthy since been obliterated by the seismic shift created by the period of smartphones. Although some artists nonetheless try to ban telephones and recordings of stay live shows, that ship has largely sailed. The order of the day is selfie sticks and vertical zoom. “Put down your telephones and dance!” one TikTok consumer opined earlier this 12 months, solely to be met with a refrain of customers responding that they may maintain their telephones and dance on the identical time.
The mass mainstreaming of pop music fandoms has additionally profoundly modified the viewers’s strategy to live shows. Specifically, Okay-pop stan tradition, with its extraordinarily structured course of for the live performance expertise, has profoundly impacted the best way fanbases internationally strategy stay performances: They’re to be filmed, micro-analyzed, edited into fancams and bite-size, social-ready clips, and unfold throughout the web.
Followers come to those live shows dressed to the nines, armed with fan chants, merch, lightsticks, and different exhibits of help like Swifties’ friendship bracelets. Whether or not it’s via chants, sing-along, or call-and-response, many live shows are additionally extra interactive than ever, and the expectation for viewers engagement is excessive. Followers who present up for Beyoncé’s Renaissance tour higher come ready to hold their half of the efficiency. In the meantime, Swifties now have so many fanchants they require explainers. “Eras tour is changing into increasingly just like the rocky horror image present and that i like it,” one fan commented on a viral fanchant video from April, referring to the cult movie whose famously interactive screenings have turn into a popular culture staple.
“Due to social media, within the final 10 to 12 years I’ve seen a shift from individuals simply carrying denims and a band T-shirt to live shows to curating seems to be wholly designed to be pictured on social media,” Sara Sirignano, a 23-year-old fan from Cleveland, informed me. Sirignano and her buddies “ritually plan[ned] out our outfits for weeks [and] months forward” of exhibits, she mentioned.
“Genuinely would reasonably skip the present than not have a great outfit deliberate for it,” she joked. She’s seen a number of live shows this 12 months, however the spotlight, she informed me, was catching the Lumineers in London and Harry Types in Frankfurt, Germany, whereas on a backpacking journey via Europe.
When she wasn’t seeing the exhibits in particular person, she was glued, like tens of millions of different followers, to livestreams of Taylor Swift’s Eras tour — a manufacturing so regimented that a number of followers informed me they knew the setlist and knew precisely which era to tune in each night time through the tour to see which “shock” track Taylor could be singing that night time. Powers’ buddies would tune in from the native bar and inform their bar mates what the shock Taylor track was. Sirignano would bond nightly over the livestream along with her sisters, who stay in different states.
Live performance livestreams, in essence, have turn into an extension of the stay occasion for tens of millions of followers. This hybrid expertise is uniquely outlined each by this period of streaming and this period of fandom. Liz, a 22-year-old BTS fan from Los Angeles, traveled to a number of cities throughout the US and Canada to see BTS rapper Min Yoon-gi (a.okay.a. Suga and Agust D) on his solo tour this 12 months, and nonetheless livestreamed many of the live shows she didn’t get to see in particular person.
“I used to be searching down livestream hyperlinks so I might watch each cease,” she informed me. In privately recorded footage she shared with me, she and her buddies watched the livestream of the ultimate live performance of the tour. There’s a dramatic second when the stage goes darkish unexpectedly, proper earlier than Suga brings out a particular visitor. As a result of all of them knew the setlist so nicely by that time, Liz and buddies begin screaming excitedly earlier than something has even occurred onstage.
“There’s an excellent particular kind of pleasure when there’s a shock on tour like a particular visitor or a brand new track,” Liz mentioned. However, she pressured, “Even with out the shock, we had been having a good time watching the identical setlist for like … truthfully the twentieth time most likely.”
This appears to show all prior hesitation about permitting followers to document and share the artist’s copyrighted materials extraordinarily improper. There’s a tangible profit to encouraging this stage of fandom and even this distant type of the stay concert-going expertise. Certainly, many followers anticipate that they’ll have the ability to view live performance streams and clips prematurely as a type of homework and engagement with the live performance and the music itself. A number of followers I spoke to described studying the setlists for bands they had been going to see on common websites like Setlist.fm, which has over 7 million setlists contributed by followers. This enables them to each familiarize themselves with the music and plan their arrival and departure occasions.
For some, followers importing live performance footage and giving ideas can even assist alleviate anxiousness across the logistics of live performance planning. TikTok’s #concerttips
The belief that audiences will be recording is putting: Nobody I spoke with had any points with the abundance of telephones at live shows; not even the latest spate of unruly live performance disruptions appeared to dampen fan enthusiasm. At this level within the lifetime of the fashionable stay occasion, there’s a built-in acknowledgment that the “stay” half has already been mediated in a number of methods earlier than the fan even arrives on the venue: By the live performance clips you’ve already seen, by the setlists you’ve already memorized, by the massive screens that allow you to see the singer, and by the cellphone you have already got in your hand.
That shift has been arduous for some artists to regulate to. “Once I’m on stage and look to you however you might be gazing right into a display, it makes me really feel as if these of us on stage are being taken from and consumed as content material, as an alternative of attending to share a second with you,” the artist Mitski wrote final 12 months in a since-deleted Twitter thread. “Live shows are bizarre now,” Mashable opined in January, arguing that the so-called TikTokification of live shows decreased elaborate phases to quick viral clips and ruined their spontaneity.
All this anxiousness invitations the query, then: If we already know what we’re getting earlier than we roll as much as the stadium, and if we’re not current within the second as a result of we’re on our telephones filming, is there something left to the “stay” expertise past what social media has already offered?
Livestreams can faucet into the expertise — however stay efficiency nonetheless retains its energy
In a phrase, sure.
“It began from the second we received out of our automobile within the parking storage and began strolling towards the world,” Morgan Strehlow, a 33-year-old literary agent from Pennsylvania, informed me about seeing Harry Types in live performance. “It did really feel like a very highly effective expertise to be there amongst type and joyful individuals and expertise the unifying power of a passionate fandom.”
For Strehlow and her sister, who stay in several states, bonding over first Swift after which Types had been a serious post-pandemic spotlight. Like Powers, Strehlow fell into her newest fandom obsession due to her TikTok feed. “I used to be detached earlier than his tour went viral on TikTok,” she mentioned. As soon as he was on her feed often, nevertheless, she mentioned she realized: “His music and messages he spreads are actually deep and significant and soulful. I beloved that. I beloved the inclusive fan base and live performance setting he fostered and the way he creates areas to have a good time all types of affection. So I needed to go expertise that, too.” She gifted her sister with tickets to one among Types’s Austin exhibits final 12 months. The 2 of them additionally noticed Swift’s Eras tour and had stored up with the livestreams as nicely — however Strehlow pressured there was no substitute for the stay expertise.
“A lot of the live performance expertise for each Types and Taylor Swift was about experiencing the stadium/area stuffed with shared pleasure and delight and love,” she mentioned, “love for the music and the artist, and love for what they signify.”
Some social media customers have expressed issues about being spoiled for live shows. On TikTok, Sirignano admitted, she’d needed to attempt to keep away from being spoiled for the Eras tour. “The Taylor live performance and Harry live shows are all the time all over the place on-line,” she mentioned. “Clips are unavoidable.” She recalled failing to keep away from a serious “spoiler” for one among Types’s shock performances — a Halloween cowl of Britney Spears’s “Poisonous” — after followers discovered concerning the track prematurely and “ruined it” by spreading it on-line.
For Taylor, she mentioned, “I used to be in a position to hold plenty of it a secret by consciously deciding to keep away from it. However it’s one thing it’s important to work arduous to do.” Some artists attempt to preserve secrecy for so long as attainable. When Beyoncé promoted her Renaissance tour on Instagram in Could, she posted footage with out sound, leaving followers excited to be taught what songs accompanied every clip.
Nonetheless, nobody I spoke to felt just like the presence of on-line streaming in the end detracted from the principle occasion. Followers additionally pressured that the little issues all add as much as make an enormous expertise. “I feel preparing with one another, listening to music, consuming, consuming, taking photographs, speaking about what we’re most enthusiastic about for the present, and so forth., is nearly half the enjoyable of the present itself,” Sirignano informed me. “I’ve been to Declan McKenna, Maisie Peters, Harry Types, Taylor Swift, [and] Sabrina Carpenter, in the previous couple of months alone, and we went via that ritual for every present.”
“If it’s a great second, it’s gonna really feel thrilling it doesn’t matter what,” Liz informed me. “Sure, realizing {that a} track is coming is one factor, however experiencing it stay continues to be magical. Plus the stage combine all the time hits totally different, and stay vocals are hearth.” And in any case, she mentioned, “You go as a result of stay music is good.”
Plus, there’s one factor that no quantity of livestreaming can replicate: Neighborhood in a shared area, a.okay.a. “collective effervescence.”
“I’ve gained a better appreciation for the work the artists put in, and I’ve rediscovered my love of stay music,” Powers mentioned. “I’ve additionally developed new friendships and deepened these with buddies that attend exhibits with me.”
“I keep in mind in 2020 having a dialog with my sister about we’d most likely by no means go to a different live performance ever once more and simply sort of accepting that as the long run,” Strehlow mentioned. “However once we received the possibility to lastly go to 1, and for an artist we beloved, we had been definitely not going to take it with no consideration.”
As for whether or not livestreaming detracts from the expertise in any method, she mentioned it was all yummy apples to scrumptious oranges.
“Livestreaming makes live shows extra accessible to those that can’t purchase tickets or journey for no matter cause,” she mentioned. “A present! Gathering with tens of hundreds of delighted followers to see our favourite artist carry out our favourite songs stay and in particular person … A present! Having the choice to log out TikTok till my present … or having the choice to remain dwelling however nonetheless not completely lacking out on the tour? Items!”
In different phrases, in case you’re feeling postpone by an excessive amount of social media in your concert-going habits, perhaps it’s time for a reset — or time to broaden your horizons and be taught to understand the various new methods followers are adjusting and increasing what it means to “attend” a live performance in 2023.
