By Femke Vandenberg
As a researcher of cultural consumption, not only did the “lockdown” of early March affect my social life but, like many others, also my work. I have been researching audience experience for the last few years, going to concerts and festivals of all genres, asking visitors what it is in the concert experience that drives and motivates them to attend.
What I quickly gathered was that music is a very social thing; it unites people through shared taste but also through participating in a shared activity. After all, a music concert is one of the few times a year we gather together with a large group engaging in collective interaction. During a concert a certain ‘buzz’ is generated, a shared feeling and excited energy, or as Durkheim called it collective effervesce.
Standing by the main stage – dressed in colourful clothes, dragged out of the bottom of the closet for this occasion, with your face coved in glitter – looking around you at people all in the same boat, instils an element of social belonging. Add some rhythmic entertainment, where you bop your head, tap your feet, move your hips and wave your arms, collectively following the bass and anticipating the drop, and you feel socially connected.
Live music has a social function, not only does it impact individual well-being, but it plays an important role in generating social solidarity.
Jump back to March 2020, when all venues, cultural centres, festivals and local bars closed their doors for the foreseen future. Where did live music go, but the only place it could, online. Artists from all genres, both professional and amateur, took to the virtual sphere with a plethora of creative quarantine concerts. It is of no surprise then that the preferred medium of choice was the user-friendly, affordable and widely accessible livestreaming servers of Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.
Of course, this shift in musical stage did not go unnoticed in the department of Arts and Culture Studies, where I work. Morning chats at the coffee machine soon turned to discussions about the impact this transition has had, not only for the industry economically speaking but also for the audience experience. While livestreams are live in terms of time, the place and/or space aspect of liveness is very different; instead of a crowded dance floor, the audience finds themselves sitting on a familiar couch. To what extent can these livestreamed concerts, then, conduct feelings of social solidarity, when physical music concerts and other social gatherings for that matter are impossible. Together with my colleagues Julian Schaap and Michaël Berghman, we ask this question as the premise for this research paper.
Through content analysis of the live chat feed of livestreamed techno concerts, this paper looks at the interactions of an audience that place connectedness and physical movement at the centre of their experience. We argue that while the participation in the comment section of livestreamed concerts enables a shared experience and provides confirmation of established membership, it lacks the ability to foster collective consciousness due to the absence of the physical audience. Without being able to see, hear or touch other participants, the concert does not have the capacity to create a ‘buzz’, failing to establish social solidarity. In other words, because the social experience of live music is fundamentally about physical engagement when this is removed, the essence is lost. It is, then, hard to see livestreams as anything more than a surrogate for social interaction (and a fairly poor one at that), falling considerably short of an actual replacement.
Read the full article here.
Interested to read about this topic in Dutch follow this link.
Contact: Vandenberg@eshcc.eur.nl
Femke Vandenberg works as a PhD candidate and lecturer at the Department of Arts and Culture Studies at Erasmus University Rotterdam. She is also a member of the executive board of IASPM Benelux (as treasurer).