Five takeaways from Tinashe's first virtual concert

If you work in the music industry, you’ve likely read, or even written, several article headlines with this structure: “[X Artist] Drops New Single, Announces New Album, Tour Dates.”

It’s a formula that artists as far-ranging as Justin Bieber, Alicia Keys, Pearl Jam and Waxahatchee have embraced in their recent PR announcements, and that implies an old-school yet still popular sequence of events in a typical album release cycle: You drop the single to build up hype for the album. A few months later, after milking out streams and press buzz from the single, you drop the full album. After giving the album several more months to marinate in listeners’ and fans’ ears, you then go on tour around the country or around the world, bringing the album to life in its fullest, most spectacular form.

You might do some press interviews or release a music video or two in between any of those steps, but the core sequence — single, album, tour — remains.

In theory, recent technological developments, like virtual reality and livestreaming, should have been able to render this formula irrelevant years ago. In today’s wild world of media, there’s so much more you can do with a fully-released album than just taking it on the road. You can develop other kinds of digital experiences and partnerships that help build a whole multimedia world around an album, in a way that communicates your creative vision more effectively to fans.

Technically, you don’t even have to tour in the first place. What if the first time you performed the contents of your new album for your biggest fans was not in a brick-and-mortar concert venue for the people who could afford a ticket, but rather in a completely different, online environment — and free of charge?

To my surprise, one of the first artists to pioneer this new approach to album campaigns was not an emerging, futuristic act, but rather R&B veteran Tinashe.

In November 2019, Tinashe released Songs For You, her first independent release after leaving longtime label RCA Records early last year. And less than 48 hours ago, she decided to do something that, to my knowledge, is unprecedented in the mainstream: rather than embark on a traditional tour, she opted to give her first performance of Songs For You in virtual reality.

In partnership with virtual-entertainment startup Wave, Tinashe staged a 30-minute virtual concert for tens of thousands of online viewers across YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. Wearing a full-body motion-capture suit, the artist controlled an avatar onstage in real time as she danced, with several prerecorded virtual backup dancers behind her.

With the help of a studio engineer, she also sang live vocals over a set list that included the Songs For You tracks “Hopscotch,” “Stormy Weather,” “Same Room for Us,” “Know Better” and “Die A Little Bit” — the order of which was determined in part by crowdsourced votes from viewers (more on that later).

The concert wasn’t 100% smooth. For one, it started around eight minutes late — but Tinashe helped pass the time by occasionally appearing in the YouTube livestream’s chat forum herself. (It’s funny how we’re mostly used to concerts in real life starting later than the listed time, but expect virtual shows to be more prompt.) The YouTube livestream also froze several times throughout the show, while the Facebook stream became super glitchy at one point, such that the number of concurrent viewers dropped from around 500 to less than 100 by the halfway point.

But aside from these technical issues, I found the concert to be an enjoyable experience that gave me more revelations about the power and relevance of virtual concerts in 2020 — especially as the format expands from a rather niche, gamer-centric activity that’s accessible only via a virtual-reality headset, to a more mainstream kind of entertainment that’s accessible wherever fans are already active.

But first, a bit more background

I wanted to get some commercial and technical background about the show out of the way, before diving into deeper analysis:

• As mentioned before, Songs For You is Tinashe’s first independent project in a while. It was released in November 2019, the same month Tinashe signed to Roc Nation for management.
• Tinashe’s virtual concert kicked off Wave’s new partnership with Roc Nation, which will consist of an ongoing series of virtual shows with Roc Nation artists.
• This is not Roc Nation’s first foray into virtual reality. The company previously signed a licensing deal with MelodyVR in 2017 for an “exclusive period,” that has now apparently come to a conclusion.
• Tinashe’s virtual concert also marked Wave’s first collaboration with a choreographer. Several virtual, cloned backup dancers appeared throughout the show — some of which a real human being pre-recorded in motion capture, and others of which were programmed to copy Tinashe’s movements in real time.
• The concert was staged and filmed from the U.S. offices of Avex, a Japanese tech conglomerate whose Future of Music investment initiative features Wave as a participant.
• Wave recently pivoted its strategy from building a fully-owned, VR-centric experience to offering a “multi-channel virtual entertainment platform” that could live on existing platforms including YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Twitch, as well as in third-party gaming engines in the future, without requiring a VR headset.

The takeaways

1. Virtual concerts can serve as a creative bridge between a music video and a tour.

Wave previously worked with artists like TOKiMONSTA to build virtual, three-dimensional, interactive worlds that expanded on two-dimensional album art. Tinashe’s concert went one step further, expanding on the world-building power of her music videos.

For instance, the Japan-inspired attire and urban backdrop during Tinashe’s performance of “Save Room For Us” was clearly referencing the original music video for the single, which was filmed in Tokyo (pictured at the top of this piece). Similarly, the virtual stage design for “Stormy Weather” paralleled the darker undertones of the song’s music video.

The concert was also effective at showing off the artist’s dance skills, while teasing at what a future tour for the album could look like, as far as high-level visual concepts and choreography are concerned. And it seems to have resonated well with fans: As of posting this article, the comment pictured below is the top-voted one on the archived YouTube video.

2. Virtual concerts allow you to pull off visuals that are impossible to replicate in the real world … but they don’t have to be detached from reality.

With their larger-than-life proportions, dynamic colors and sparkly visual effects, the stage designs on display during Tinashe’s virtual concert would be practically impossible to pull off in real life.

If you watch the archived livestream, though, you’ll realize that the show isn’t quite detached from reality, but rather is actually rooted heavily in it.

From time to time, in the bottom-right corner of the livestream, viewers would see video footage from the Avex studio that showed Tinashe singing live and controlling her avatar in real time. As a viewer, I was fascinated by this additional camera angle, because it made you realize that not only were we watching Tinashe, but Tinashe was also watching herself. While there were several cat-like avatars representing viewers onscreen, Tinashe wasn’t facing a “crowd” so much as she was facing her virtual clone onscreen, monitoring her moves with the utmost focus and precision. It was almost like she was playing a game, as herself.

In addition, in the Avex office, Tinashe was surrounded by a small crowd of people (presumably Wave employees, her own team members and other collaborators and partners) whom you could hear applauding and cheering at the end of each song she performed.

In this sense, the “Tinashe avatar” is quite different from that of, say, 100% virtual beings like Miquela or Auxuman that can’t be mapped to any known, singular human personality. Thanks to this additional camera footage during the show, viewers knew that it was really Tinashe herself who was singing and dancing live; you could see the technological transformation unfold in real time, in a way that actually humanized rather than dehumanized the experience.

3. The user interactivity of virtual concerts combines the traditional show with the fan meet-and-greet.

At two points during Tinashe’s concert, viewers could cast their vote on what “vibe” they wanted to see next, by flooding the chat or comments section of the livestream with their preferred choice.

In the first instance, viewers voted for a “stormy” vibe over “flow,” leading Tinashe to give a performance of “Stormy Weather”; in the second instance, viewers voted for “neon” (screenshot below), leading to a neon-decked performance of “Save Room For Us.” Viewers could see these votes being “cast” in real time via animated visualizations onscreen.

In addition, there were a few brief moments in between songs where Tinashe acknowledged comments from fans that were projected into the atmosphere behind her (screenshot below).

Wave has previously implemented other forms of viewer interactivity in its live shows, such as taking down a virtual “boss” via a comments-driven battle. These are all prime examples of gamification that involve fans directly in the show’s production, while combining the intimacy of artist interaction and acknowledgement with the scale of a multi-channel livestream.

4. Artists who aren’t steeped in livestreaming or virtual entertainment culture won’t get the reach they’re looking for.

While Tinashe’s virtual concert broke down boundaries in many ways, it also didn’t reach as people as I expected, especially given the artist’s own social presence.

Currently, Tinashe has around 1.6 million YouTube subscribers, one million Twitter followers and two million Facebook likes. But according to my own tracking, during its 30-minute premiere, her virtual concert attracted only 3,330 concurrent viewers max and 18,000 total views on YouTube (i.e. ~1.1% conversion rate); at most 500 concurrents max and 12,300 total views on Twitter (~1.2% conversion); and around 500 concurrents max and 8,000 total views on Facebook (0.4% conversion).

There are a few potential reasons why that conversion rate might be so low. It might be an issue of these tech platforms not doing a good enough job of spreading the word and notifying fans about live premieres and other similar online experiences. Or perhaps it’s an issue of Tinashe’s audience skewing slightly older, or not being as accustomed (yet) to the culture around livestreaming and virtual entertainment.

For instance, it makes sense that electronic-inspired violinist Lindsey Stirling attracted many times more viewers (>400,000 total) for her respective Wave concert last year, as she had built much of her following and career directly on YouTube for several years beforehand. (Another reason why Stirling’s concert drew more viewers than Tinashe might simply be that the former was longer, clocking in at almost 100 minutes versus just 30 minutes, respectively.)

This arguably drives home the point that virtual concerts will reward not those who have the biggest audience, but rather those who have an intimate knowledge and understanding of livestreaming culture and behavior. As Wave’s CEO Adam Arrigo told me in April 2019, off the heels of Marshmello’s brief set in Fortnite: “At some point, it’s going to stop being about the Marshmellos and Weezers of the world, and will start to be about any artist who understands the medium.”

5. R&B has a place in music-tech innovation.

Part of why I was surprised that Tinashe was one of the first mainstream artists to embrace this virtual entertainment format is that R&B as a genre is not normally framed as a pioneer of tech innovation.

Many music critics predict that R&B is going to have a breakout year in 2020, particularly with respect to influencing wider pop culture. Some of the groundwork is there: R&B artists like Frank Ocean, Summer Walker, Daniel Caesar and Ari Lennox are towards the top of this year’s Coachella lineup, while others including SZA, The Weeknd and Alicia Keys will be dropping new albums in the coming months.

But aside from initiatives like the Motown Musician Accelerator, R&B artists rarely have a voice or are considered in conversations around the future of music technology and startups. Hopefully concerts like Tinashe’s will help bridge that gap, and give the genre a more prominent role in driving technological innovation in the music industry in the future.