✖ Dream: the future of massive interactive live events for music
And: festival apps; Catalog's NFT market place; Primavera Sound organises live gigs; Big Hit Ent 2020 financial results: best yet; fan-controlled football; saving jazz history
✍️ Today’s newsletter is written by Maarten Walraven
Back in August, Bas argued that two of the key elements for the longevity of virtual concerts are interactivity and for the audience to have magical powers. One place to find these elements is in MILEs [massive interactive live events, a term I first came across with Jacob Navok, CEO of Genvid]. Such events are cloud-based and use only a single simulation to bring together large amounts of players who all interact and influence the game in real time. Most of these events so far have been game-based and serendipitous: Twitch Plays Pokémon, Reddit's Place, and more recently Facebook's Rival Peak (built with Genvid). Basically, organising a MILE means tapping into gaming culture and gamifying what you do if it's not already a game. The closest we've come so far in music is Travis Scott's performance in Fortnite. Inside the game the performance was limited to 50 people per 'room' but millions watched the show via Twitch or YouTube streams, either live or afterwards. What this virtual concert lacked was the ability for the audience to affect what happened. To unleash true interactivity and provide magical powers to viewers that ability to affect is exactly what we need.
👉 I’ll show you how we’ll get there by focusing on the motion-capture, dynamic soundtrack, and virtual forest created in the Unreal Engine for the upcoming performance of Dream by the Royal Shakespeare Company.
TECH
📳 Music data and research company Viberate has released a new report on festival apps. Some key findings
mobile tech has helped drive the music festival experience since 2007
75% of the world’s top 50 festivals have their own app
almost every music festival is expected to have an app by 2025
70% of festivalgoers keep the app on their phones after the festival
🔥 Catalog is a market place for NFTs focused on music. And they have a launch date
💭 A tool to create titles for your YouTube videos with a little help from GPT-3. Do we need this?
🎹 On the topic of things we need, perhaps we don’t need live performers anymore? This AI-driven project generates a video based on audio input.
🏈 On the topic of MILEs, it’s always interesting to see how sports is getting in on the action too. In the US, you now have fan-controlled football. It plays live on Twitch and the fans call all the plays in real-time.
CORONA
🎷 Axios has a round-up of how musicians, artists, and fans are trying to save jazz, and jazz history, from being lost into the pandemic.
😷 Dr. Fauci cautions the American people to not dine indoors or go the theatre - and thus also a concert - quite yet, even if they have been vaccinated. “The burden of virus is still too high,” he says.
🎶 Primavera Sound has planned concerts between 26 April and 2 May. They say they will adhere strictly to all coronavirus safety measures. Whether or not those safety measures will be the same as with the live experiment they hosted a while back is not known right now, but rapid testing could be a part of attending those gigs.
💵 Big Hit Entertainment just keeps getting stronger and stronger. The label, home to BTS, released their best financial results yet for 2020. Weverse has been downloaded 25 million times. And:
“Although the revenue from off-line concerts declined due to COVID-19, official merchandise and licensing, content, and fan club-related sales increased by 53%, 71%, and 66% respectively, compared to 2019.”
🧷 Here’s an interesting discussion about whether venues (and restaurants for that matter) will require proof of vaccination. It may create a safer environment, but will businesses turn away income? Some people may be eager to get back to live activity, but what about that other group that crave safety? Who will you cater to first and foremost?
Music
This might not be for everyone reading this newsletter, but I listened to some drone music while writing today’s newsletter and article. I tried some stuff I didn’t know yet, but in the end Kevin Drumm’s Imperial Distortion remains such a feat of power that I’ll highlight that one. Best experienced with headphones.
As an aside, check out how Drumm uses Bandcamp to set up his fan subscription service.