A fortnight ago, FT Alphaville experienced what felt like a great privilege: we went to a concert with real people.
At Oslo Hackney — a Nordic-tinged venue in London’s East End — we sat in Covid-compliant tables of two to watch William Doyle , a floppy-haired art-pop songwriter who is somehow part Eno, part Fripp and part D. James. Perhaps it was just the sound of hearing a real sound system for the first time in half a year, but the experience was frankly euphoric.
For millions of music fans across the world, however, the ritual of going to a gig has all but died with the pandemic. It’s a serious economic problem as well as a social and emotional one. Estimates of global losses to the concert industry have been pinned at $9bn , while in the UK alone there’s talk of 170,000 live-music -related jobs disappearing by Christmas. On the corporate side, US-listed promoter and ticket shiller Live Nation’s share price is still down 14 per cent from its February highs, despite a significant bounce following Monday’s vaccine news.
For musicians who have grown to depend on live music as their main source of income, the pandemic is existential. Yet, out of any crisis comes opportunity, or so the saying goes. And a recent start-up offers one such example.
Driift is a live stream ticketed music company launched earlier this year by ATC Management’s Ric Salmon and Brian Message. The idea is achingly simple: if people are willing to pay £24.99 to watch Anthony Joshua damage his brain on a Saturday , why won’t they pay similar to do the same to themselves while watching U2? Particularly when there’s not even the option to go to the event in person.
Like most management companies, ATC is not itself a household name but it does represent some, including Laura Marling, PJ Harvey and personal favourite Kelly Lee Owens. Which is particularly helpful when you’re trying to prove a concept that not many have tried before.
It’s no surprise then that Laura Marling, the Brit-award winning Joni Mitchell heir apparent, was Driift’s first gig back in June. Since, Driift has put on shows for artists ranging from pop queen Kylie Minogue to anarcho-Britpop act Sleaford Mods. And the signs are so far it’s working — to date 250,000 tickets have been sold, putting total gross bookings in the range of £2.5m to £5m.
While questions will linger over whether the concept will have legs post-pandemic, it’s not hard to build a case that streamed gigs are here to stay. Over the past two decades concerts have got outrageously expensive and are generally only held in a few select cities bar the odd festival. In short — like the practice of being an artist — they’ve become a locus for time-rich affluent urbanites. Ticketed streamed shows, therefore, can be a great leveller for those unable, for whatever reason, to take a five-hour round trip to the nearest arena -- that’s if your favourite artist is even playing in your country. It may seem like a moot point but, for many, a live concert is a rare experience. Driift’s concerts has pulled viewers from 151 countries including Kiribati, Cape Verde and the Faroe Islands. Not exactly the sort of names you associate with your typical headline world tour. Even when touring resumes, it’s fair to speculate that one-off streamed concerts will remain enticing to artists, both as a way to access hard-to-reach fans and as a promotional tool.
So what of the economics? Driift have focused so far on putting on high-production-value shows, so that paying audiences get an experience that is not just your standard filmed concert experience. That, of course, carries a serious cost. We talked to Ric Salmon and Brian Message on Monday, who revealed that the typical all-in cost for a show so far has been in the £40k to £50k range. For a concert like former One Direction member Niall Horan’s at the weekend, which sold over 100,000 tickets, that’s not a problem.
For emerging artists at the bottom of the food chain, however, that cost could be prohibitive, potentially exasperating the already-widening income gap between the megastars and everyone else. The team at Driift, it must be said, are aware of this issue, and as well as trying to bring the costs down, hinted in the future they are planning to spread one concert’s costs over multiple artists — perhaps in the form of a showcase or “festival”.
In a way, it’s odd that it took a pandemic for ticketed streamed gigs to become a reality. Consumers have long paid to watch one-off sporting events live on TV, so why wouldn’t they with a one-off concert?
Judging by the Napster debacle of the early noughties , the music industry has never been the most proactive. It’s too early to say whether it will be a boon to the consumer like the MP3 was, but the early signs are promising that the practice will at least bring the rush of live music to the homes of those who could never access it before. And it’s hard to argue that’s not a good thing.