Can Live-Streaming Ever Replace Live Gigs? Pt.1: Who's Watching?

Some people are interested in live music, some people are interested in media. Draw a Venn diagram of these two groups, and you’ll find me slap-bang in the middle. That’s why a few days ago, I was debating the economics of a shift away from live gigs towards live-streaming as a way for bands and DJs to stay visible in a world where large gatherings of people are verboten.

While I believe that this current way of life won’t last forever, it’s impressive how many businesses have adapted their models to account for the distance between us all. DICE FM and Mixcloud stand out as two businesses in the music space who have reacted with new products and programs to stay relevant. A few years ago, I spoke to the former head of marketing at DICE FM, who said that their main competitor is Netflix. That was a shrewd observation even at the time, and in the current cultural climate, this ended up being somewhat prescient. 

Make no mistake, live-streaming artist performances has become the major bet to replace live gigs, as we stare down the barrel of a long summer devoid of long days drinking cider and lounging around the main stage. Defected launched the UK’s first ever virtual festival in March, and Beatport have hosted a series of non-stop live music events, amongst several other virtual festival line-ups that are springing up in response to the current situation.

Can live-streaming ever replace live events?

In order to understand the scope for live-streaming to replace live gigs, we first have to understand what motivates people to attend a live gig in the first place. To this end, EventBrite surveyed 250 people a few years ago to understand what people enjoy most about going to gigs. This probably seems a little tenuous, but this was the best research I was able to find, short of a Mintel login. If you know any more up-to-date or expansive studies, let me know!

Of the reasons given you can categorise them three ways: things that live-streaming can easily replicate, things that live-streaming cannot replicate, and things that might be replicable, depending on how you interpret the question. Based on this categorisation, only 17.2% of people go to gigs for a purpose that can be easily replicated by live-streaming. A third of people enjoy live events for reasons that really cannot be replicated by live-streaming. 

Based on YouGov 2019 data, 20% of people in the UK attend gigs once per month or more. If you overlay that with the proportion of people who go to gigs for reasons that live-streaming can easily replicate, you get 1.7 million gig-goers in the UK who should be relatively easy to ‘convert’ to live-streaming gigs. That’s not huge in the total scheme of things, but to put it into context, it’s around 8 times the size of Glastonbury’s annual attendance.

But what do you do about the other 11.5 million gig-goers who won’t be so easily convinced? Well the biggest opportunity is around helping the audience feel close to the artist. This is a tricky one as it’s very open to interpretation; can a live chat window replace the physical closeness that one feels at a live gig? That will depend on the individual. For some it simply won’t be what they’re looking for; for others it might even be preferable. Most live-streaming services, including Twitch, Instagram and Mixcloud, include some form of live chat feature.

I’ve a feeling that ‘closeness’ works very differently for different kinds of artists and their respective fans. Perhaps the desire to be closer to an artist is amplified the more ‘out of reach’ that artist is perceived to be. In other words, the more famous an artist is, the more valuable the feeling of ‘closeness’ becomes, as provided by live gigs. So this might unlock audiences at the higher echelons of the music industry, but might not be as valuable to small- to medium-sized acts.

Can music live-streaming ever cross over to mainstream viewing?

There are also strengths that live-streaming has that don’t apply to live gigs, which might help to offset the benefits that are unique to live gigs, and even offer an opportunity to win a share of the 80% of UK adults who don’t already go to gigs regularly. Firstly, live-stream attendance is relatively low-cost and low-effort compared to live gigs. Doesn’t that seem like a blindingly obvious point? Yep, absolutely, but it has implications for the frequency at which people might be able to attend, but also the value that promoters are able to extract from them.

Let’s return to that earlier comment about Netflix being a competitor to the live music space. To win share in this area, live-streaming needs to be incremental to this screen time, or replace it entirely. Live gigs can tempt casual audiences away from the TV with the promise of an atmosphere, a nice pint, a change of surroundings. The same doesn’t apply with live-streaming. You might point out that live-streaming is arguably closer to Linear TV in terms of live programming, so the comparison with Netflix and other on-demand services falls down. The reality is, it doesn’t really matter. It’s all screen time, it’s all attention. Motivations might differ slightly, but hours in the day do not!

There’s a very real sense that lots of screen viewing, whether live or on-demand, is being driven by fear of missing out. Aside from the intrinsic entertainment value of the show itself, there’s extrinsic social currency in talking about shows you’ve watched with your social group. There are lots of theories of where this social currency comes from, but I’ve always enjoyed the idea that it’s a form of ‘practiced state’; the idea that fiction allows us to ‘practice’ certain emotions and discussing them with our peers helps us to process these emotions and reactions.

Perhaps I’m having a failure of imagination, but I simply can’t see how live-streaming music or DJs could offer anything exactly like this. But that doesn’t mean live-streaming can’t create social moments that are worth talking about. Perhaps live-streaming is simply waiting for it’s equivalent of the Pyramid Stage headliner; arguably the sole live performance that genuinely penetrates popular culture at large.

Conclusion

So where does this leave us? The good news is that there is a healthy audience of people who are readily receptive to replacing their gig attendance with live-streaming; the bad news is that it might be smaller than you might otherwise expect. If there’s one, broad, vaguely-trivial point to take from all of this, it’s that converting gig-goers to live-streaming is more complex than it might initially appear. It isn’t simply a case of asking gig-goers to tune in, as the motivations and capabilities of each experience differ in meaningful ways.

In order to grow live-streaming for artists and DJs in the midst of social distancing, live-streaming platforms have to at least ‘win’ people who actively like to discover music, and offer tools for creating moments of interaction with each other and with the artists themselves.