The music industry has witnessed the emergence of online culture and a tectonic shift away from physical music records. This has also placed a fixated demand on live performance and its digital counterpart. With websites like Playtoome, Youtube, NPR, there has been a presence of demand since these video-sharing platforms have been distributing digitally available music concerts sanctioned by the artists or by the label. However, the implications are particularly varied in the case of Playtoome which is an exclusive digital platform where you can view your favorite artists live and interact with them too. As opposed to that YouTube has been built along the lines of a social content platform where users can share, upload or view the contents present there. You might as well be seeing a bootlegging of live music and how it has transcended from being contained in a physical space.
With the onset of video-sharing culture, trans-media can very well act as a trajectory for digitally available concerts which are structurally creating reformatory models. This piece will delve into an inquiry and what makes you can watch Coachella streamed live as opposed to visiting the grounds.
Digital Concerts as an archive
The role of live performance and music is constantly shifting within the spheres of popular culture. As much as you’d love to go to a concert for the livid experience, you’d also want to contain the moments of it. To replicate such token desires, digital concerts are an archive of its own. Be it Radiohead’s Glastonbury performance or Queen’s Wembley stadium performance, it all adds to being preserved that can be relayed or replayed for the consumption of their future audience.
The era of streaming has also seen this sense of frivolity where digital concerts are being taken for granted – and that is the kind of entitlement that comes with ready-made archives. Although that does not affect the new wave of digital concerts, it surely does make abundance an issue.
Consumer Engagement
Empirically speaking, the music streaming platforms have been collecting surplus revenues harping on all the latest trends. I am sure you are acquainted with MTV Unplugged which was the closest to a recorded live concert that you could watch on TV. But live streaming has not been a stranger phenomenon. It has been a pervading technique used for sports and news across generations. In the natural progression of the streaming bandwagon, digital concerts are becoming more popular since viewers can watch their favorite artists play in the comfort of their homes. Professional streaming sites are also cooperating with unsigned artists to give them a platform and leverage this trend for their independent distributors.
Digital concerts are increasingly being liked since they provide powerful branding. The metrics are also backing this fact – some broadcasters are collating such data to improvise on a better experience for their fans. Now, with VR intervention, digital concerts are being fully transformed into a 360-degree experience with some platforms providing interactive features for the sake of engagement. A live concert when recorded/streamed also exposes a fan to what the real experience might entail – that often ends up with them showing up for the live concert eventually.
Immune but for how long?
Music seems to be immune to most technological travesties but recorded or streamed concerts can be detrimental to our conventions. But that’s exactly where the catch is, even amidst the wake of the COVID-19 virus epidemic, musicians are still playing live concerts for their fans. And, that is possible since streaming exists – so you are witnessing a transformation that leads us to newer possibilities of digital concerts. Playtoome is also a part of that holistic change and you can too spend the lock-down staying inside while watching live concerts of your favorite artists.