LIVESTREAMING

After a boost from the pandemic livestreaming is here to stay

From the earliest days of the COVID-19 pandemic and its lockdowns, artists turned to livestreaming as a way to play for their fans, and chat to them as well. Stuart Dredge reports

Deezer’s Jeronimo Folgueira

Jeronimo

Folgueira: “I believe that live and ondemand streaming complement each other perfectly”

Twitch’s Tracy Chan

YOUTUBE, Facebook, Instagram and Twitch saw the bulk of the COVID-led livestreaming activity. But a number of tech startups also emerged to help musicians hold more ambitious online concerts. The scale and ambition has only grown since then, with major artists including BTS, Billie Eilish, Dua Lipa and Gorillaz — as well as prominent events like the Glastonbury Festival — launching ticketed video streams, either live or pre-recorded. This has intersected with another trend: the growing number of music performances appearing within games and virtual worlds including Fortnite, Roblox, Minecraft and Oculus Venues, the VR space run by Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook. “It took 10 years to evolve from CDs to streaming and only 10 months to shift to the livestream model,” says Fabrice Sergent, managing partner at Bandsintown, in Midem’s exclusive Livestreaming & Virtual Live Experiences white paper, published earlier this year. In that same report, Twitch’s vice-president of music, Tracy Chan, said that it has been “inspiring to see the resilience of the industry and how artists and venues have embraced live streaming”. In the summer and autumn of 2021, physical concerts and some festivals have returned, with organisers tackling challenges ranging from securing the necessary insurance to devising suitable entry policies regarding vaccinations and/or COVID-19 testing. This does not mean that livestreaming will go away again. It has the potential to remain a key part of the music ecosystem, not to mention the revenue streams of artists. In preparation for this new hybrid live economy, 2021 has seen a wave of consolidation and investment within the livestreaming tech world. One recent example of the latter was a $122m funding round raised by British firm Dice, which has evolved from a mobile ticketing app into a key player in the livestreams space. Its CEO, Phil Hutcheon, has spoken about how streams will sit alongside physical concerts in the future. “We’re also seeing that big artists want to play more intimate rooms. They can play the arenas on their tour, but they still like to play to 2,000-3,000-capacity rooms,” Hutcheon said in September. “So you’ll see more of them doing that for livestreams and they can actually make as much profit from playing the smaller show as they would from the arena show, with the livestreaming revenue.” Consolidation in 2021 has included Live Nation investing in livestreaming startup Veeps, and US firm Mandolin acquiring rival NoonChorus. The other livestreaming trend to watch in 2022 is how streaming services step up their own efforts. Amazon Music has integrated sister service Twitch into its app to host artist livestreams; Spotify held its first ticketed online concerts in May and June; and Deezer has invested in startups Dreamstage and Driift. “I believe that live and on-demand streaming complement each other perfectly. We want to make sure that we’re part of the evolution of livestreaming and the fast growth we’re going to see in this space,” Deezer CEO Jeronimo Folgueira says. n