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‘A Dramatic Shift In What’s Possible’: The Future Of Livestreaming Discussed At Midem Digital
null – The opening panel at this year’s Midem Digital.
From top left to bottom right: Ric Salmon (Driift), James Sutcliffe (LiveNow), Edo Kovarsky (Stage11), Gideon Gottfried (Pollstar) and Michelle Munson (Eluvio)
Pollstar hosted the opening panel of this year’s Midem Digital Edition, Nov. 16-19, which carried the optimistic title “COVID is Dead, Long Live Live Streaming”. And while there’s ample evidence contradicting the first claim of the title, it certainly looks like livestreaming is here to stay.
The speakers on the panel: Michelle Munson, Founder & CEO of Eluvio (U.S.), Edo Kovarsky, VP, Growth & Monetization at Stage11 (France), James Sutcliffe, Global Head of Music of LiveNow, and Ric Salmon, Director of ATC Management and co-founder and CEO of Driift.
Joel Ryan – Nick Cave during his solo performance in Alexandra Palace’s West Hall.
The livestream was produced by Driift.
The panel opened with Driift CEO Ric Salmon talking about the early days of live streaming. He was referring to the Nick Cave concert, streamed from the West Hall of Alexandra Palace in June of 2020, only 17 months ago at the time of writing. Yet, “it feels like a different generation, doesn’t it,” said Salmon, and continued, “for the last 18 months or so, we have been working in a vacuum to a certain extent in the live streaming world, because artists, for the most part, had a vastly reduced workload, at least in terms of their usual [touring] cycle.”
Live streams had been a focal point for artists and managers in that time, and while “life was returning to normal,” Salmon didn’t think “live will ever return to what it was completely before the pandemic, because I think the challenges of crossing borders will remain for a very long time to come, unfortunately. And the cost of traveling is increasing dramatically.”
While for the least three months or so, LiveNow Global Head of Music James Sutcliffe felt like live streams “had to be kept on life support”, artists have started to incorporate them into their album release and touring cycles again. They’re no longer the only way of performing live to fans, but the process of setting them up comes natural now. This was the “dawn of what [live streaming] could become,” Sutcliffe said.
The key questions for everyone in the live business is currently, how to make up for the losses incurred over the past 20 months. And as the panelist aimed to show, artists have a lot more options to earn money from live streams than just through ticket sales.
Eluvio, for instance, monetizes live streamed content on the blockchain. Company founder and CEO Michelle Munson encountered several instances where live streams complemented a “moment-in-time offering,” referring to the rise of NFTs across all forms of art. “We have now been involved in three shows that have combined the streaming experience with some type of NFT offer or drop. That’s also being combined with tours and new releases.” The Nov. 9 concert by Angels & Airwaves, for instance, was live streamed worldwide on Eluvio and came with a NFT drop.
As Munson pointed out, aside from recording live footage in real-world locations, artists are also streaming from virtual environments. One of the most-viewed live streams of 2021 according to Pollstar data, for example, was Jean Michel-Jarre’s performance from a digital recreation of the Notre Dame in Paris.
– The team at Stage11 envisions stages that could never be built in the real world.
Specializing in digital environments where artists and fans can interact is Stage11. The company’s VP Growth & Monetization Edo Kovarsky said, “we at Stage 11 don’t think that online concerts or live streamed concerts will ever replace actual live concerts.” Instead, he continued, they would add to the experience and create a bigger market. He agreed with Munson that NFTs will become a huge new revenue stream for artists. This was largely due to the fact that NFTs and blockchain technology offer new ways of licensing content to artists and their teams.
The live streaming business doesn’t have too much in common with the traditional live business, all panelists agreed on that. Therefore, questions about replacing one another were moot. “It’s an easy comparison to make, naturally one thinks of them as being part of the same industry, but in so many ways, they are entirely separate constructs, entirely separate processes, and in most cases, entirely separate set of rights and revenue models. There are almost no similarities apart from the fact that a band are playing live,” Salmon explained. He compared it to sports, where the opportunity to watch the favorite team at home didn’t stop people from going to the stadium ever so often, but rather had the opposite effect.
– Eluvio has been involved in several shows that have combined the streaming experience with some type of NFT offer or drop.
According to company founder and CEO Michelle Munson, “it really is a dramatic shift in what’s possible for any creator to control the outcomes of their work and have a direct relationship with their fans.”
The team at Driift sees itself as producers and promoters of live shows. Salmon emphasized, that live streams were a newly created art form, and that “it’s been many, many years since there’s been an evolution in the music industry that has come along to provide artists with a new form of creative expression. The last one was short form media on social media, which has evolved in different ways.”
Generally speaking, this short form content has only become shorter, which, according to Salmon, was the opposite of how an artist worked: “An artist, by definition, wants to tell stories, and true music fans want to consume stories. Live streaming has [brought] a new ability to tell stories, communicate with fans, and express an art form artists are in complete control of. And, of course, to monetize it.
“We’ve got ourselves in this ridiculous scenario where artists essentially give away the vast majority of their audio visual content for free,” he continued, aside from maybe a “tiny sliver” from YouTube, artists didn’t earn anything from all the other main social channels they share content on.
Munson said the downside of being able to share everything so easily in the digital world, which is that artists lost control of their copyright. She said blockchain technology was now “capable of allowing fans to directly support artists through buying in to tokenized models,” which went along naturally with the live streaming experience. “It’s a shift, it’s now possible for a fan to express their support directly by buying tokenized offering the artist create,” she explained.
A real alternative in a world, where it has become increasingly difficult for artists to sell copyrighted material, that allows for “really scalable income,” according to Munson, “it really is a dramatic shift in what’s possible for any creator to control the outcomes of their work and have a direct relationship with their fans.”
– LiveNow is working on combining its high-quality live streams with other monetization tools like tipping, virtual and physical merch and NFTs.
The live sector is going to go through an incredibly tough time of the coming years. “Everybody’s going to be touring, every venue is going to be [booked up], costs and margins are being squeezed enormously by some of the larger players in the live sector, which is a reflection of the market conditions. We’re seeing ticket prices being raised, we’re seeing costs handed down, net returns from tours are getting squeezed as costs are going up,” Salmon summed it up, referring to increased travel costs – for coronavirus tests, carnets to move equipment in a post-Brexit world and everything related to border control.
The panelists therefore agreed that artists should make use of all alternative revenue opportunities outside the traditional structures, and that an industry claiming to have the artists at heart should be encouraging these new models.
Before fans are willing to pay artists directly, though, the content needs to be worth it. Each company on the panel has a different approach to making sure it is, from cinematically produced footage to immersive virtual worlds. Kovarsky said, “we need to redefine what it means to have collectables of artists. What does it mean to a 16-year old, who doesn’t trade sports cards anymore, to own a piece of the artist, of the creator itself?”
And to become creators themselves, Kovarsky continued, “people would buy a T-shirt at a show. How do we bring this ability to capture a moment in a concert and turn it into a souvenir in the NFT world?”
Stage11 caters to a customer base that spends up to six hours a day in virtual worlds and metaverses. It’s the reason Travis Scott can perform on Fortnite and generate some $20 million in revenues. That’s the world Kovarsky wants to tap in. He envisions stages that could never be built in the real world, thereby enhancing the brand of an artist to a level that has never been seen before.
There’s still a lot of appeal in the real world, though. One of LiveNow’s recent livestreams was the Black Eyed Peas performing in front of the Pyramids in Cairo, Egypt. It doesn’t have to be that elaborate, Sutcliffe explained. But as smaller bands, too, will find less performance spaces available – not just due to overbooking, but also because many grassroots venues had to shut down – they’ll look to alternative concert locations that may not offer the infrastructure to host a full audience, but at least look spectacular on camera.
Once that’s combined with other monetization tools like tipping, virtual and physical merch and NFTs, tools LiveNow is working on integrating into its business, it could offer a real opportunity to the many artists, whose connection with their fans has become more important than ever.