In early lockdown, four kids from Toronto’s underground gay club scene were distraught. The nightlife they depended on — “safe spaces, where we get to exist freely” — had vanished. Two of them worked as musicians and DJs, and were deprived of live performance and income. So they looked for another way.
“Someone in our Insta group chat said Zoom,” says co-founder Ceréna Sierra. “We tried it, and we could see all these people in funny little squares. We thought, what is this mess?”
Club Quarantine, their online queer dance party, started in March and was an instant global phenomenon: lively, anarchic, with DJs, musicians and performance artists entertaining partygoers and fans.
They turned up in their thousands from bedrooms all over the world, every night of the week. “On the fourth night we had an email from Charli XCX who wanted to be part of it,” says Sierra, 29, who rattles off more big names: “We’ve had Lady Gaga, Laverne Cox, Caroline Polachek, Big Freedia . . . ”
But “Club Q” quickly hit a tech wall. By June, it had 60,000 followers and far more requests to join than Zoom could handle. So the organisers brought in Mixcloud, a UK-based music streaming and social media service, which had rushed out its “Live” feature in April in response to the pandemic. The feature allows DJs and performers to broadcast live to fans, at high quality and speed, with copyright cleared and royalties paid to songwriters and original artists.
One of the biggest Club Q events drew more than 30,000 partygoers, a Halloween extravaganza sponsored by dating app Grindr with New York ballroom DJ MikeQ. Thanks to big-name sponsors, Club Q can now pay its performers. It has even hired staff.
Musicians, DJs and organisers have seized on services such as Mixcloud and online radio stations, as they have tried to replicate the thrill — and at least some of the revenue — of live events. That has been difficult, but artists say they value the chance to perform.
Mixcloud Live has hosted more than 180,000 events, including Club Q and high-profile acts playing ticketed events, such as Lafawndah and Róisín Murphy, who performed last week. But until March, the feature was “a backburner project”, says Nico Perez, co-founder of the company set up in 2008. “We had an internal hack week in mid-March, they built the first version within a week, and a functioning version within three.” Halloween was so far its busiest night of the year.
“I have been deeply troubled by the lack of imagination and proposals during [the pandemic]. As if suddenly, because we are restrained, magic and fantasy had to disappear,” says Lafawndah, the Parisian singer-songwriter, who played an October concert filmed in an east London church. “It was very important for me to offer something that retains story telling, dream, narrative and world-building.”
Festivals, too, have used web-based services to keep going in 2020. The jazz-inflected, boutique We Out Here, for example, switched to live digital via its own website and Mixcloud, after it was forced to abandon its annual August weekend in Cambridgeshire, which last year hosted 10,000 people. The digital offering was partly funded with a grant from the Arts Council, matched with sponsorship deals that allowed the organisers to pay artists and staff.
“In some ways it freed us,” says Joe Barnett, managing director of NVS, the company behind the festival, which this year featured sets by Marshall Allen in Philadelphia and Elite Beat in Oregon. “We approached 2020 by saying, we don’t need to be confined by who’s in this country, we now have a global audience.”
“We’ve moved 10 years in the last six months,” says David Jones of the London Jazz Festival, which takes place this week with ticketed and free shows via its website, YouTube and Mixcloud (until November 22). “There’s less pressure to book big stars, and more freedom to explore. It’s a byproduct of an appalling time: collaborations are vibrant, rather than something we painstakingly negotiate.”
Femi Adeyemi, co-founder of online radio station NTS, sees a revival of “human-curated” music in collaborative, live digital offerings. “[Spotify’s] algorithm has its pluses but it can never replicate the emotion you get from a human putting music together: the mood, the weather outside, the things that affect how a person feels on a certain day.”
With studios in London, Manchester, Los Angeles and Shanghai, NTS had picked up more than 2.5m unique monthly listeners by the end of May — a year-on-year rise of 103 per cent. “Our focus is discovery. We might focus on a certain scene in a certain city, or music from a certain era or type of film,” says Adeyemi. The free-to-listen service allows streaming of live or archived shows, DJ sets and “infinite mixtapes” by an array of genres. “I would put us into a bracket of music streaming — not on the same level as Spotify, but laser-focused on the underground.”
Fifty per cent of NTS’s music cannot be found on Spotify, says co-founder Sean McAuliffe, “either because it’s not available on Spotify yet or because it’s a rare undiscovered gem from decades ago”.
The station makes money with sponsorship: a recent series in partnership with Adidas, for example, featured sets by guest artists playing unexpected music: Lee “Scratch” Perry played Johnny Nash.
With a vaccine on the horizon, We Out Here’s Barnett predicts audiences will return to live shows. “By next summer the UK population will want to experience something with their bodies.” But social distancing may continue, and Perez says technology is ready.
“We will start to see limited capacity shows with a hybrid model approach — buy a ticket if you are 25 and live near the venue, but if you are 65 and live further away, buy a digital ticket.”
Club Q, meanwhile, plans to keep the global party going in virtual reality. “Think like the Sims,” says Sierra, who visualises “virtual performances — like Coachella, with a stage, and as a user you can go in, walk around freely, dance with people and immerse within the world.”
For Sierra, technology has also offered a lockdown lifeline. “I thought, are the best years of my life going to be spent in quarantine? I felt robbed. But it’s been wonderful.”
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