Is Livestream the Future of Music Festivals?
Since 2005, Belgium has played host to the most popular music dance festival in the world: Tomorrowland. Attendance in recent years has neared half a million people, attracting some of the world’s biggest artists — Steve Aoki, David Guetta, Bebe Rexha, among many others. The show, normally split over two weekends, sells out months in advance (and in minutes), bringing together people to the appropriately-named town of Boom.
And this year’s edition, the 16th, was in some ways its most successful and groundbreaking yet.
Indeed, as travel has plummeted and large social gathering is absent in most countries due to the ongoing pandemic, Tomorrowland pivoted its summer 2020 show to a fully virtual format that featured nearly 70 artists, drawing more than one million viewers worldwide. Platforms such as YouTube, Twitch, and Facebook streamed the shows to viewers on every continent, allowing in most cases a livestream chat for users to engage with fellow fans during the performances. (Several shows were later broadcasted to accommodate differing time zones.) And while the shows themselves were captivating — Katy Perry rocked, man — the livestreams and their chats helped recreate the magic of concerts, that charge of standing amongst thousands of strangers all sharing a common love for story and sound.
We’ve seen that two…
