"With live shows slowly returning, we’re seeing a fundamental contradiction play out: Even as livestreaming platforms continue to raise more funds and announce marquee celebrity partnerships, demand for music livestreams has gone down significantly from its peak last year" - Cherie Hu looks at the (last year's) promising new live music domain. "There are two possible reasons for this stagnation. One is that music livestreams just haven’t really innovated as a format to the point where fans are continually willing to pay for them... Maybe fans are just more interested in seeing these artists perform in person".

"Concerts in real life have various constraints like budgets, the chance of accidents, space limitations, etc. But when it comes to a virtual world, there are none. If you have a crazy idea, you can get it implemented. And this widens the scope of how musical concerts can be done and how artists can interact with fans" - metaverse enthusiast E2Analyst writes in the Medium after seeing Ariana Grande perform in Fortnite.

Despite the return of music festivals, virtual events are here to stay according to new data published by United Talent Agency, the LA Times reports. Three out of four people attended an online event during the pandemic. Of those who participated in a virtual event, 88% said they plan to do so again even when in-person gatherings return. The survey indicated that people are "most excited" for sporting events, concerts and movies.

“There was a 360 portal and you could go step on stage with them, and you could pick your camera angles” - Christian Guirnalda, director of Verizon’s 5G Labs, told Rolling Stone about the recent Black Pumas show, recorded at company's Los Angeles 5G Labs. Producers filmed in 4K video on a camera connected to Verizon’s 5G Ultra Wideband network, which can create a “visually lossless” experience that “eliminates the side effects of image compression that’s visible to the naked eye”. There was no postproduction, either - all the visuals were rendered in real time. Rolling Stone believes this is the future, even after the live shows return.

280 upcoming bands - including Indigo Sparke, Shannen James, Chubby and the Gang, and Black Country, New Road - performed last week at the online edition of South by Southwest. The bands performed from their living rooms and backyards. Paste Magazine was at the (web)site to witness a "smooth, yet strange virtual event that, by streamlining the festival experience, necessarily sapped it of all the chaotic energy and excitement that makes live music (let alone festivals) so irreplaceable". The New York Times says SXSW "came back with a genuine joy".

Northern California singer-songwriter Jenna Mammina began hosting twice-daily webcast/livestreaming events on March 23, 2020, and hasn’t missed a single day since she started, which amounts to 730 unique shows in one year. She calls these live-streams “11:11 with Jenna” - with a new episode debuting daily at 11:11 a.m. and a totally different one following at 11:11 p.m. (those are New York Times, meaning that's 4:11 PM and 4:11 AM in Rome, and in Singapore the 11:11 AM episode is at 11:11 PM and the 11:11 PM is at 11:11 AM). She hosts these shows via Zoom and people can join in by visiting Facebook.com/Jenna.Mammina. She plans to continue indefinitely, as she's told the Mercury News - "I never want to stop. I love the community that we have created, the inner connectivity with people all over the world. I’m ready to keep going for as long as it stays in line with my life".

Isol-Aid started in March as a one-off festival, but the success of the first one gave organizers strength to continue. It has since grown into a weekly event, with an average of four artists performing, Guardian reports. It has since hosted 881 artists, resulted in record deals, evolved to a paid gig (to compensate the artists), with around 35,000 viewers on average tuning in each week. Bigger artists like Julia Jacklin, Stella Donnelly, and Middle Kids appear alongside lesser-known, like health-care workers doing music as a hobby. It's streamed on TikTok, where performers stream on their own account and then direct audiences to the next act, as well as on Isol-Aid.com. On Sunday, March 21, line-up consists of Jaguar Jonze, Hockey Dad, Julia Stone, and Isaiah Firebrace.

“We’re approaching things by saying, ‘Let’s not even pretend that we’re trying to replace the live club experience’” - James Minor, who oversees SXSW Music, says to Texas Monthly about this year's edition of the famous festival. Instead of bringing 45-minute sets as part of an six-hour event at a club, each showcase will be a single hour of entertainment, because “people’s attention spans are a lot shorter online”, Minor says. There are no big-name headliners this year, he says, instead, this year’s festival will be focused on launching the careers of artists who’ve struggled with getting attention during the pandemic. “It’s supposed to be the coming-out party for what happens next in music" - Minor explains. Some of the bands who are going to perform are English new rock stars Black Country, New Road, country artists Jade Jackson and Aubrie Sellers who will perform together, Danish heavy metal heavyweights Iceage, Montreal shoegazers No Joy... SXSW 2021 is due March 16-21.

American singer-songwriter Todd Rundgren has embarked on a virtual tour of 25 American cities which is broadcast from the same Chicago stage, but geo-targeted to different regional markets, Variety reports. Shows come with visual cues saluting the would-be host towns and multiple shout-outs to the virtually targeted city. The focus is on making each show a unique event, with a virtual perimeter that will restrict viewing of a particular show to audience members who live there. Prior to shows, there’s the sound of murmuring people looking for their seats, and for every city on the video wall behind the band there'll be a picture of the actual proscenium stage. This virtual tour runs February through March. Tickets go for $35.

Manchester Orchestra have just premiered 'A Black Mile To The Surface: The Global Concert Film' which saw the band perform their most recent album - 2017's 'A Black Mile to the Surface' - live in its entirety in Echo Mountain Recording in Asheville, NC, the same location that they recorded the album. The sound is great, as well as the band and the songs (from their, probably, best album).

Online live concert database BandsInTown announced first-of-its-kind subscription service created to bring live streaming experiences to the homes of fans. Subscribers are entitled to perks like chat sessions with artists and access to footage of concerts highly sought-after on other platforms. For $9.99 per month fans get an “All Access Pass” to over 25 live shows per month. Fans can also take comfort in knowing their money will directly benefit the artists they love. An inaugural lineup featuring names like Flying Lotus, Toro y Moi, Little Dragon and more.

Inspired by Underoath's announcement about how they made $800,000 on three live-streams (on tickets, merch, and vinyl), Metal Sucks made some estimates about the price of online shows. According to one industry insider, expenses for one live-stream are: $20,000 for live event production - venue rental, camera operators, live video switcher, lights, monitors, audio mixer; $40,000 - broadcast platform fee (20%); $30,000 - the management (15%). Those estimates can vary, of course, but in a case like this, the band would have made a $20k-$25k profit per show, which is roughly $3k-$4k per band member.

Death Cab for Cutie’s Ben Gibbard, Guns N’ Roses’ Duff McKagan, Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock, and Mark Lanegan teamed up to make a very nice cover of the Jimmy Webb country classic 'The Highwayman'. The backing band featured Foo Fighters’ Nate Mendel, members of Death Cab, The Afghan Wigs, The Walking Papers, and guitarist Ian Moore. The collaboration was part of SMooCH 2020, an annual benefit show for the Seattle Children’s Hospital. The hour-long event also featured sets from Angel Olsen, Jason Isbell, Clipping., Kim Gordon, J. Mascis, and Fred Armisen.

An impressive list of artists - Dolly Parton, Henry Rollins, Cher, Jason Isbell, Amanda Shires, Phoebe Bridgers, Boy George, Brandi Carlile, Brittany Howard, Kim Petras, King Princess, Sharon Osbourne, Taylor Swift, LL Cool J, Billie Eilish, Whoopi Goldberg, Bette Midler - has been announced for Cyndi Lauper's annual holiday benefit show. Virtual edition of 'Home for the Holidays' streams on Friday, December 11 (at 8 PM New York time, 2 AM on Saturday Berlin time, 8 AM Beijing time) on TikTok, and on Sunday, December 13 (at 10 PM Rio de Janeiro time, 3 AM Monday Kairo time, noon on Monday Sydney time) on YouTube and Facebook. Proceeds go to True Colors United, a non-profit that works to end homelessness among LGBTQ youth

Dua Lipa’s Thanksgiving-weekend Studio 2054 live-stream drew five million viewers, it was broadcast in territories across the world, cost upward of $1.5 million, and took nearly five months to put together. Lipa’s management says it was a profitable venture with 284,000 tickets sold, and that Lipa will do another live-stream in the future regardless if in-person shows come back first. Rolling Stone believes Lipa’s show was also a highly "successful guinea-pig case for the music business". Tech platform Live-Now is selling tickets for fans to catch the recorded show until Sunday, 8,50 euro per ticket.

Travis Scott’s virtual concert in Fortnite in April reportedly earned him roughly $20million including merchandise sales, according to a new Forbes report. In comparison, Scott’s four-month-long, 56-stop Astroworld tour from 2018 to 2019 garnered approximately $53.5million, or roughly just under $1million per show. Despite the actual virtual concert’s length of nine minutes, it took months to put the event together. The show also attracted a record concurrent player count for Fortnite of 12.3 million.

Lil Nas X performed four virtual shows in two days in the video game Roblox, attracting 33 million views, The Verge reports. The identical shows starred a motion-captured incarnation of Lil Nas X, styled to fit in with a world that shifted to match each of the four songs he performed. It's big numbers for Lil Nas X, but a huge one for Roblox, getting into the same league with Fortnite - it hosted a performance from Travis Scott early this year that drew 45.8 million viewers across five shows.

Irish pop-rock singer and songwriter Niall Horan has sold impressive 125,000 tickets for his online concert held at empty Royal Albert Hall in London. These tickets were sold in whopping 151 countries across the globe - which “you’d never come close to on a tour”, producer Ric Salmon told Variety. The data suggest that two-to-three people are watching each stream sold, which would make it 400,000 watching Horan's show. The tickets went for £16 a pop, with all of it going to his crew.

South-African experimental pop artist Desire Marea performed a virtual concert with a host of first time collaborators. They performed gorgeous live renditions from Desire Marea's this year debut 'Desire', making them mesmerizing, jazzy, and atmospheric.

"The nearly two-hour show was part music, part comedy, part documentary, with cinematic production values that rival those of a home video release" - CoS writes about Mr. Bungle's Halloween show The Night They Came Home. "Instead of treating the camera like an audience member that isn’t there, Mr. Bungle used it like a film director, making the concert portion more like a performance video than a webcam stream", CoS adds, praising the use of guests - Josh Homme, Henry Rollins, Buzz Osborne - to bridge moments of silence between songs.

A very useful article by Henry Prince about monetisation features at the biggest platforms for artists and managers turning to live-streaming. The article provides artists with a beginner’s guide to ways of making money from live streaming at Twitch, YouTube, TikTok and Twitter...

"The design of Eilish’s live stage not only exceeded expectations; it provided effects that would be nearly impossible to pull off at an in-person concert" - CoS writes in a review of Billie Eilish's online show 'Where Do We Go? The Livestream'. Guardian's Alexis Petridis said it was "both striking and entertaining".

An awesome performance by the Run The Jewels who did their first live performance since releasing their latest album 'RTJ4'. Killer Mike, El-P, and DJ Trackstar performed the new album in full, and they were joined virtually by several of the album's guests on the big screen behind them - including Zack de la Rocha, Josh Homme, Mavis Staples, Pharrell, 2 Chainz, Mr. Muthafuckin' eXquire, and Cochemea, and in person by Gangsta Boo and Greg Nice. They did the performance in an empty venue with a full light show.

47% of music listeners feel it is important for the industry to offer livestream performances or virtual concerts, new Music 360 Report by MRC Data shows. So far only 25% of music listeners have tuned in to one of these shows, Billboard reports. Pandora co-founder Tim Westergren estimates the current value of the business at around $1 billion, with the potential to grow to the "tens of billions" within three years.

New York’s jazz festival Vision has been rescheduled and adapted for the sour times we live in now - it will take place both live and online starting Thursday, October 8 with a livestream solo performance by trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, Jazz Times reports. A series of events - including performances by Oliver Lake, Andrew Cyrille, Amina Claudine Myers, and William Parker - will follow through Monday, October 12 that will be both livestreamed and held in front of an outdoor audience. The outdoor edition will be limited-capacity, socially distanced. Daily outdoor tickets are $75, and virtual tickets are $15.

he Forty-Five describes innovative methods K-pop artists use to make online concert feel alive and exciting, making fans feel like they're close to the musician, even closes in some instances. Organizers use Zoom to make feel fans cheering on from home over Zoom as a venue crowd. Few lucky viewers get real-time video calls from musicians. Also, the acts are merging online chatrooms with between-song banter...

Puerto Rican rapper and singer Bad Bunny performed outside on a moving, lit-up bus, which took him through the streets of New York on Sunday, Sept 20. At one point, he literally stopped traffic as fans chased after him, Hollywood Life reports. He streamed this event to his YouTube channel.

The majority of concerts is moving online, and hopefully, the number (and production quality) of these will grow, so Spotify is adjusting. This week the streaming service had added all those virtual concerts to its "On Tour" listings. Spotify is working on it in partnership with Songkick.

On October 1st, Facebook will update its terms of service agreement which will make it harder for DJs to stream their sets since it will limit the use of videos, and unauthorized content may be removed, DJ TechTools reports. Which leaves Mixcloud Live the only truly “safe” place to stream live DJ sets. For years, Mixcloud has done the hard work of negotiating with rights organizations to be able to host hundreds of thousands of mixes that contain copy-written musical works. It’s a decent system and actively being developed. The other two options out there are YouTube and Twitch, both which have become somewhat more aggressive over DJ set copyright.

Perfume Genius will perform from the Palace Theater in downtown Los Angeles, on Saturday, September 19. Tickets are available in advance for $15 ($20 day of the event + $5 for access to stream an acoustic solo encore). During the concert, Perfume Genius mastermind Mike Hadreas will be joined by a six-piece band as well as a string quartet. They will perform music from Perfume Genius’ latest, critically acclaimed album 'Set My Heart on Fire Immediately'.