It began with easy nostalgia. Within the wake of the pandemic, Craig Powers, a 38-year-old researcher from Tacoma, rediscovered his love for his favourite bands and albums. However as Powers dove deeper and deeper into the music world, he discovered himself not solely returning to beloved artists, however discovering new music and albums. This was largely because of TikTok, which continuously served him live performance clips of stylistically adjoining musicians through his feed, a broad swath of emo, metalcore, and post-punk artists.

On the peak of this new/previous obsession, nevertheless, Powers realized a grim reality about social media: Watching bands on TikTok didn’t put cash in these artists’ pockets, and streaming residuals are so paltry that listening to albums on Spotify or YouTube wasn’t sufficient. If Powers wished to help all the brand new bands he was into, he couldn’t simply watch live performance clips on his feed: He wanted to go to the live shows themselves.

So Powers, who tells me he by no means does “something half-assed,” began out 2023 with a objective of seeing 30 live shows earlier than the top of the yr. The journey he launched into led him to recapture his love of stay music, uncover much more bands, and hit his objective far sooner than he anticipated: He took in live performance quantity 30, Weezer, final month. And naturally, he documented all of it on TikTok, the place all of it started.

Powers isn’t the one particular person whose relationship to stay leisure has modified profoundly in recent times. The age of streaming media has introduced with it elevated entry to live performance footage, front-row fancams, and extremely mobilized fanbases who method all the things in regards to the live performance season prefer it’s their job. From shopping for tickets (good luck) to prepping for the large evening by rigorously planning the proper live performance outfit, these followers do all of it — and plenty of of them do it on digicam, sharing the entire expertise with different die-hards on-line.

Clearly we’re in a brand new period of live performance media — and as with all eras, we’ve each gained and misplaced a bit alongside the way in which.

These aren’t your mother’s bootlegs

Throughout an enormous vary of genres from Okay-pop to hardcore, streaming and sharing platforms like TikTok and Instagram are altering the way in which folks take into consideration streamed live performance footage and viral moments from a stay occasion. The savviest artists not solely know that their viewers can have their telephones out, however anticipate it. Final yr, Rosalía and TikTok collectively earned a Latin Grammy nomination for a music movie filled with bite-size, clippable moments, all filmed on cellphones, that aired stay on the platform. And Taylor Swift simply introduced the discharge of a whole film of her already-legendary Eras tour — conveniently dropping earlier than the European leg of that tour kicks off.

Livestreamed and social media-boosted live performance clips have turn out to be so ubiquitous that it’s jarring to look again and do not forget that for a lot of the web’s historical past, filming live shows in any respect was verboten. Blogs like NYC Taper and BB Chronicles, alongside an countless rotation of torrent servers, specialised in sharing live performance clips and archiving bootleg recordings of classic live shows. The web site Relisten makes a speciality of curating a lot of the stay live performance footage shared on the Web Archive throughout a long time — all the things from the Grateful Useless to bluegrass band Trampled by Turtles. The undertone of all these web sites boils all the way down to “please don’t sue us”; many of those blogs embody disclaimers stressing that their collections are supposed to complement, not change, the stay live performance expertise.

This shamefaced, don’t-ask-don’t-tell method to bootlegging live shows has lengthy since been obliterated by the seismic shift created by the period of smartphones. Although some artists nonetheless try and ban telephones and recordings of stay live shows, that ship has largely sailed. The order of the day is selfie sticks and vertical zoom. “Put down your telephones and dance!” one TikTok consumer opined earlier this yr, solely to be met with a refrain of customers responding that they might maintain their telephones and dance on the similar time.

The mass mainstreaming of pop music fandoms has additionally profoundly modified the viewers’s method to live shows. Specifically, Okay-pop stan tradition, with its extraordinarily structured course of for the live performance expertise, has profoundly impacted the way in which fanbases internationally method stay performances: They’re to be filmed, micro-analyzed, edited into fancams and bite-size, social-ready clips, and unfold throughout the web.

Followers come to those live shows dressed to the nines, armed with fan chants, merch, lightsticks, and different reveals of help like Swifties’ friendship bracelets. Whether or not it’s by way of chants, sing-along, or call-and-response, many live shows are additionally extra interactive than ever, and the expectation for viewers engagement is excessive. Followers who present up for Beyoncé’s Renaissance tour higher come ready to hold their half of the efficiency. In the meantime, Swifties now have so many fanchants they require explainers. “Eras tour is changing into an increasing number of just like the rocky horror image present and that i like it,” one fan commented on a viral fanchant video from April, referring to the cult movie whose famously interactive screenings have turn out to be a popular culture staple.

“Due to social media, within the final 10 to 12 years I’ve seen a shift from folks simply carrying denims and a band T-shirt to live shows to curating seems to be wholly designed to be pictured on social media,” Sara Sirignano, a 23-year-old fan from Cleveland, informed me. Sirignano and her pals “ritually plan[ned] out our outfits for weeks [and] months forward” of reveals, she mentioned.

“Genuinely would moderately skip the present than not have a very good outfit deliberate for it,” she joked. She’s seen a number of live shows this yr, however the spotlight, she informed me, was catching the Lumineers in London and Harry Types in Frankfurt, Germany, whereas on a backpacking journey by way of Europe.

When she wasn’t seeing the reveals in particular person, she was glued, like thousands and thousands of different followers, to livestreams of Taylor Swift’s Eras tour — a manufacturing so regimented that a number of followers informed me they knew the setlist and knew precisely which era to tune in each evening in the course of the tour to see which “shock” tune Taylor could be singing that evening. Powers’ pals would tune in from the native bar and inform their bar mates what the shock Taylor tune was. Sirignano would bond nightly over the livestream together with her sisters, who stay in different states.

Live performance livestreams, in essence, have turn out to be an extension of the stay occasion for thousands and thousands of followers. This hybrid expertise is uniquely outlined each by this period of streaming and this period of fandom. Liz, a 22-year-old BTS fan from Los Angeles, traveled to a number of cities throughout the US and Canada to see BTS rapper Min Yoon-gi (a.ok.a. Suga and Agust D) on his solo tour this yr, and nonetheless livestreamed a lot of the live shows she didn’t get to see in particular person.

“I used to be searching down livestream hyperlinks so I may watch each cease,” she informed me. In privately recorded footage she shared with me, she and her pals watched the livestream of the ultimate live performance of the tour. There’s a dramatic second when the stage goes darkish unexpectedly, proper earlier than Suga brings out a particular visitor. As a result of all of them knew the setlist so nicely by that time, Liz and pals begin screaming excitedly earlier than something has even occurred onstage.

“There’s a brilliant particular kind of pleasure when there’s a shock on tour like a particular visitor or a brand new tune,” Liz mentioned. However, she confused, “Even with out the shock, we had been having a good time watching the identical setlist for like … actually the twentieth time most likely.”

This appears to show all prior hesitation about permitting followers to file and share the artist’s copyrighted materials extraordinarily unsuitable. There’s a tangible profit to encouraging this stage of fandom and even this distant type of the stay concert-going expertise. Certainly, many followers anticipate that they’ll have the ability to view live performance streams and clips upfront as a type of homework and engagement with the live performance and the music itself. A number of followers I spoke to described studying the setlists for bands they had been going to see on well-liked websites like Setlist.fm, which has over 7 million setlists contributed by followers. This enables them to each familiarize themselves with the music and plan their arrival and departure instances.

For some, followers importing live performance footage and giving ideas also can assist alleviate nervousness across the logistics of live performance planning. TikTok’s #concerttips tag is stuffed with important data like when and learn how to purchase tickets, the place within the venue you need to sit, and learn how to prep for hours of live performance exercise. Cellphone etiquette is a giant topic as nicely: Reminders to deliver your charger or a battery pack, unencumber storage for live performance movies, and ideas for learn how to get the best-quality live performance footage once you file.

The belief that audiences will be recording is placing: Nobody I spoke with had any points with the abundance of telephones at live shows; not even the current spate of unruly live performance disruptions appeared to dampen fan enthusiasm. At this level within the lifetime of the fashionable stay occasion, there’s a built-in acknowledgment that the “stay” half has already been mediated in a number of methods earlier than the fan even arrives on the venue: By the live performance clips you’ve already seen, by the setlists you’ve already memorized, by the large screens that make it easier to see the singer, and by the telephone you have already got in your hand.

That shift has been arduous for some artists to regulate to. “After I’m on stage and look to you however you’re gazing right into a display, it makes me really feel as if these of us on stage are being taken from and consumed as content material, as an alternative of attending to share a second with you,” the artist Mitski wrote final yr in a since-deleted Twitter thread. “Concert events are bizarre now,” Mashable opined in January, arguing that the so-called TikTokification of live shows diminished elaborate levels to brief viral clips and ruined their spontaneity.

All this nervousness invitations the query, then: If we already know what we’re getting earlier than we roll as much as the stadium, and if we’re not current within the second as a result of we’re on our telephones filming, is there something left to the “stay” expertise past what social media has already supplied?

Livestreams can faucet into the expertise — however stay efficiency nonetheless retains its energy

In a phrase, sure.

“It began from the second we obtained out of our automobile within the parking storage and began strolling towards the world,” Morgan Strehlow, a 33-year-old literary agent from Pennsylvania, informed me about seeing Harry Types in live performance. “It did really feel like a extremely highly effective expertise to be there amongst variety and joyful folks and expertise the unifying drive of a passionate fandom.”

For Strehlow and her sister, who stay in numerous states, bonding over first Swift after which Types had been a significant post-pandemic spotlight. Like Powers, Strehlow fell into her newest fandom obsession due to her TikTok feed. “I used to be detached earlier than his tour went viral on TikTok,” she mentioned. As soon as he was on her feed repeatedly, nevertheless, she mentioned she realized: “His music and messages he spreads are actually deep and significant and soulful. I cherished that. I cherished the inclusive fan base and live performance setting he fostered and the way he creates areas to rejoice every kind of affection. So I wished to go expertise that, too.” She gifted her sister with tickets to one in every of Types’s Austin reveals final yr. The 2 of them additionally noticed Swift’s Eras tour and had stored up with the livestreams as nicely — however Strehlow confused there was no substitute for the stay expertise.

“A lot of the live performance expertise for each Types and Taylor Swift was about experiencing the stadium/enviornment filled with shared pleasure and delight and love,” she mentioned, “love for the music and the artist, and love for what they symbolize.”

Some social media customers have expressed considerations about being spoiled for live shows. On TikTok, Sirignano admitted, she’d needed to attempt to keep away from being spoiled for the Eras tour. “The Taylor live performance and Harry live shows are all the time in all places on-line,” she mentioned. “Clips are unavoidable.” She recalled failing to keep away from a significant “spoiler” for one in every of Types’s shock performances — a Halloween cowl of Britney Spears’s “Poisonous” — after followers came upon in regards to the tune upfront and “ruined it” by spreading it on-line.

For Taylor, she mentioned, “I used to be capable of preserve lots of it a secret by consciously deciding to keep away from it. However it’s one thing it’s a must to work arduous to do.” Some artists attempt to keep secrecy for so long as doable. When Beyoncé promoted her Renaissance tour on Instagram in Might, she posted footage with out sound, leaving followers excited to be taught what songs accompanied every clip.

Nonetheless, nobody I spoke to felt just like the presence of on-line streaming in the end detracted from the principle occasion. Followers additionally confused that the little issues all add as much as make an enormous expertise. “I feel preparing with one another, listening to music, consuming, consuming, taking pictures, speaking about what we’re most enthusiastic about for the present, and many others., is nearly half the enjoyable of the present itself,” Sirignano informed me. “I’ve been to Declan McKenna, Maisie Peters, Harry Types, Taylor Swift, [and] Sabrina Carpenter, in the previous couple of months alone, and we went by way of that ritual for every present.”

“If it’s a very good second, it’s gonna really feel thrilling it doesn’t matter what,” Liz informed me. “Sure, understanding {that a} tune is coming is one factor, however experiencing it stay continues to be magical. Plus the stage combine all the time hits completely different, and stay vocals are fireplace.” And in spite of everything, she mentioned, “You go as a result of stay music is good.”

Plus, there’s one factor that no quantity of livestreaming can replicate: Group in a shared area, a.ok.a. “collective effervescence.”

“I’ve gained a higher appreciation for the work the artists put in, and I’ve rediscovered my love of stay music,” Powers mentioned. “I’ve additionally developed new friendships and deepened these with pals that attend reveals with me.”

“I keep in mind in 2020 having a dialog with my sister about we might most likely by no means go to a different live performance ever once more and simply sort of accepting that as the long run,” Strehlow mentioned. “However once we obtained the possibility to lastly go to 1, and for an artist we cherished, we had been actually not going to take it without any consideration.”

As for whether or not livestreaming detracts from the expertise in any method, she mentioned it was all yummy apples to scrumptious oranges.

“Livestreaming makes live shows extra accessible to those that can’t purchase tickets or journey for no matter cause,” she mentioned. “A present! Gathering with tens of 1000’s of delighted followers to see our favourite artist carry out our favourite songs stay and in particular person … A present! Having the choice to sign off TikTok till my present … or having the choice to remain residence however nonetheless not completely lacking out on the tour? Presents!”

In different phrases, in case you’re feeling postpone by an excessive amount of social media in your concert-going habits, perhaps it’s time for a reset — or time to broaden your horizons and be taught to understand the numerous new methods followers are adjusting and increasing what it means to “attend” a live performance in 2023.