At-Home Livestreams Are So 2020. Bigger, Bolder Concert Experiences Are The Future

By Deepa Lakshmin


Lightning strikes. There’s a web of tangled branches, a flash of sequins; Misterwives frontwoman Mandy Lee emerges from the darkness of a blank computer screen, mic in hand, along with a booming thunder in her voice as she launches into “Over the Rainbow.” Especially for a virtual concert while in a pandemic, the performance’s stage design had to measure up to the band’s bigger ambitions.


“We wouldn’t have the ability to bring like 30 trees on tour, you know?” Lee tells MTV News over a video call about the various theater sets the musical group and their crew built within the past four months: a skyline of clouds, a lonely bedroom, a poppy field in full bloom, a bubblegum-pink disco party. Each installation got its turn in the spotlight in The Live Dream, Misterwives’s ticketed virtual concert that streamed earlier this month on Moment Home — the event startup that took residence $1.5 million in seed funding from backers like Scooter Braun, Troy Carter, Jared Leto, and Kygo’s Palm Tree Crew.


In truth, “virtual concert” doesn’t do The Live Dream justice. The blink-and-you-missed-it costume changes, the sheer volume of sets, and the expansive choreography wouldn’t make sense on the intimate stages Misterwives came up playing in their hometown of New York City. Although on campus at Rochester Institute of Technology — where they rehearsed and filmed the show over countless days before editing it down and streaming the recorded set — they had the time, space, and resources to go bigger and bolder with their production. It’s a “silver lining,” Lee says, because it wouldn’t have been possible to pull off such a grand efficiency if their original 2020 tour plans had panned out.


Moment Home founder Arjun Mehta tells MTV News over the phone that terms like “livestream” or “virtual show” are “limiting” or “feel inferior.” They prefer “moments.” The startup advises artists give attention to what they can deliver digitally that they could never create in real life. “You’re not supposed to compare the two,” Mehta adds. “This is supposed to be an entirely new unit, not a replacement.”


Though much of Moment House’s funding came soon following the onset of COVID-19, the agency was founded in late 2019 with a 10-year product vision that hopes to keep the events rolling soon following the pandemic ends. With the live-music industry on hold since March, artists have nonetheless kept the connection alive, first with intimate at-home performances, then eventually with scaled-up concerts in genuine venues. Moment Home feels like the next logical step in that evolution.


Artists using Moment Home — among them Halsey, Yungblud, Blackbear, and a Justin Bieber New Year’s Eve efficiency coming up — set their own ticket prices and pocket 100 percent of that income, and the startup expenses an added 10 percent service fee to cover operating expenditures. Selling tickets, besides paying the expenditures, also filters out casual listeners, Mehta points out. You’re left with core fans who can typically eager to find their people. Pre-recording The Live Dream meant that Lee could join Moment House’s live chat while in the show and interact in real time with these “Instawives,” the title of the Instagram DM sort began by fans. A Discord server soon followed.


“I thought it was going to be like a movie, and it also was going to be weird,” Misterwives super fan Jireh Deng tells MTV News over the phone. “Actually, it was really fun, and I felt like I was still segment of a community as I was watching it online, although we weren’t there physically in person.”


Crowds tune in from across the globe, and if they don’t live near a tour stop, this might would their only shot to be able to see their preference musical group perform. It’s a dilemma that BTS, with their worldwide Army, were working to solve even before COVID-19. Last June, the megastars broke the Guinness World Record for most viewers for a music concert livestream on a bespoke platform. A whopping 756,000 fans logged on for their virtual efficiency broadcast by Kiswe, a cloud-based organization founded in 2013 that offers AR and XR technologies and multi-camera perspectives, among other equipment, to prepare at-home viewing more engaging.


“It’s like a blank canvas,” Kiswe CEO Mike Schabel says over video about stages that are intentionally designed for digital crowds as a substitute opposed to arenas. In the BTS set, as an example, “everything was a pixel — from the best, the bottom, the sides.” Any time you’re surrounded by LCDs and running video beneath your feet, the opportunities become endless. Throughout a second Kiswe livestream in October, the K-pop categorize employed multi-view capabilities to tell six different stories running in parallel across four stages, so fans could pick their preference. With augmented reality, they were even able to watch and hear fans react in real time. (According to a Kiswe report, BTS was “happy to be able to see you, even if it’s through a screen.”)


Adam, Jack, and Ryan Met — with each other referred to because the New York-based pop musical group AJR —  are currently gearing up for their own Kiswe livestream, One Spectacular Night, airing on Saturday, December 26. They tried out drive-in shows first, and right now they’re planning a “virtual concert that really blows up the idea of what a virtual concert can be,” Ryan says over video. Fans expect big spectacles at their performances; on tour last year, they did a step-by-step recreation of how they produced “Don’t Throw Out My Legos” based on the snare of The Beatles’s “Penny Lane” and the sound of Jack dropping his keys, then closed out the night with a parade of simulated drummers pulled from the light-up suits they wore onstage.


Right now the trio is letting their imagination run wild and networking with closely with Kiswe to bring their vision to life. While an in-person tour stop might have eight or so impressive feats, this show will have one for practically every song, from Jack walking in midair thanks to wire automation, plus laser and LED tricks that look like magical illusions.


“It’s weird because we’re living in a global where this idea of the livestream and what it might would be is being built as we’re doing this,” Adam says. With tours, you know how much cash, how several lights, and what sort of stage you’re working with, although “there hasn’t really been a box put around what a livestream can be yet.”


Nevertheless the assortment of livestreams grows daily, according to statistics from Bandsintown, which has been aggregating livestream music events across genres and hosting platforms since March. The website registered over 62,000 livestreams in nine months. In June, 1.9 percent of music livestreams on Bandsintown were ticketed; that skyrocketed to 50.7 percent by the end of November, with 80 percent of fans on the site prepared to pay for access. Fabrice Sergent, managing partner of Bandsintown, assignments that artists could “double their income” in the future if they incorporate ticketed livestreams into their long-established tour plan of action to reach fans globally. Over video chat, he compares it to the developments and profitability of physical records: “That change happened over 10 years. The switch to livestream happened over 10 months.”


Bandsintown’s heat map of livestreaming information, shown below, proves that crowds across the nation are tuning in, albeit in much less concentrated groups far away from major cities. Right now the concert industry is finally catering to those underserved markets and, as a result, becoming more inclusive of and available for fans everywhere.


“When you’re touring and the cash machine is well customary, you repeat the cash machine. You turn that crank,” Schabel says. “Well, unfortunately the industry got decimated this year… and you should rethink a new cash machine, and this one was categorize kind of sitting there in the wings.”


For AJR, it’s been cool to be able to see how several fans they have in Southeast Asia and South America — places they’ve never played before — so they can imagine those locations for tours down the line. Until right now, social media was the main way to connect with such crowds. Though there’s habitually appreciation for unscripted Instagram Live or Twitch sessions straight out of an artist’s living room, both AJR and Misterwives welcomed the creative challenge to step outdoors their comfort zones and build something entirely brand new for their fans.


“I feel like it’s like putting out your album and then putting out the demos or sharing your voice memos,” Lee says about sharing cozy videos of herself playing by her Christmas tree. “You can have this pretty polished product but… seeing the inner workings of us doing it ourselves, or ‘this is what it sounded like stripped down,’ I feel like that resonates so much more, even [when] you put everything you’ve got into the bigger production stuff.”


Each form of musical storytelling works hand-in-hand with another; the large-scale livestreams that are timed down to the second complement spontaneous posts, just as they’re expected to complement in-person concerts whenever they return. “I do think it’s nice to pull back the curtain,” Lee continues, “and be like, we’re all of the same here.”