Dude are you going to the Roblox Concert? – An Analysis of the Future of Performances
If you scrolled through your Instagram feed pre-2020 you would know how much people loved concerts. Your high school best friend is at that new music festival, that one guy from your stats class is posting in a mosh pit, and even your mom is posing with the band at happy hour. It felt like everyone was at some sort of live music event. So, it was unrealistic to assume once COVID-19 hit that live music will stop. No matter what, live music will always be an important part of people’s lives. Once people learned that pandemic concerts were very dangerous and inconsiderate people started looking for a different option to see their favorite artists. And virtual concerts were born, spanning from videos filmed on artists’ phones to high-quality setups to even video games or virtual reality environments.
One of the pioneers of the videogame concert was Travis Scott performing his Astro World tour in the popular video game Fortnite. While regular concerts are often limited to the venue space and physical design video game concerts have whatever a developer can load into the game. This has led to never-before-seen visuals, costume changes, and changes in audience interaction. These concerts were more accessible to a younger audience because of them being hosted on popular children’s games like Fortnite, Minecraft, and Roblox. They also allowed fans to express themselves more through avatars in dress and reactions while being in the comfort of their own gaming chair.
Virtual concerts were also popular with artists holding live streams, phone recordings, and even high production videos. A great example is Tiny Desk Concert converting to at-home videos. Tiny desk concert is an NPR program that has artists play with a small band in a small space that is not very COVID safe. In the past, it might have been hard for an artist to film themselves if they don’t have the correct technology but now almost everyone has a high-quality camera attached to their
phone to film. Other performances saw companies sending out a team to aid artists to film their content like Chloe and Halle’s recent performance. Which saw the duo performing in a park field with the camera crew zoomed in from a distance.
Compared to the other proposed solutions virtual concerts found themselves being the most convenient and accessible. For example, drive-in concerts were a popular solution at first, but they turned to be controversial. The first being that artists still had to travel from place to place which left lots of room for musicians to be exposed to the virus and expose others. The other controversy being that audiences would consistently get out of their cars without masks and break quarantine to share cars with their friends. Overall drive-in concerts seemed to be more of a hassle than a convenience.
Virtual concerts mean the future of music. It is difficult to think that everyone will be comfortable going back to regular concert schedules. With most people’s access to high-quality filming and recording equipment, updated streaming abilities in video games, and our ever-changing creativity to share content it is not necessary to have people come in person.
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