The major design element missing from virtual music festivals: Spatial thinking
Has anyone else felt the music livestreaming hype die down in recent weeks?
It might be in part due to current events. There are much more important conversations happening on a global scale right now about racism and police brutality against Black communities, and about how all kinds of music companies are complicit.
Independent of these cultural, social and political issues, there’s also an economic issue with livestreaming. Namely, it’s not sustainable for any artist to keep doing it for free. As I recently argued, we’re now in a second wave of livestreaming where artists are being more discerning about issues like compensation, audience development and production value. Concerts are also reopening around the world at an unsteady, inconsistent rate; some major properties like Lollapalooza are cancelling altogether for the year. This implies that livestreaming as a regular outlet for performance and fan engagement will be around for the long haul.
One question in particular that keeps coming up: How do we make online events that are actually exciting and worth paying for?
Today, I want to propose one design element that has been missing from most virtual music events, and could help make them more fun, intuitive and valuable for fans: Spatial thinking.
The role of spatiality in music experiences
As humans, we are inherently spatial beings. Studies across philosophy and the behavioral sciences have found that our sense of self is innately tied to our environment. When we’re lost or disoriented — when our internal cognitive maps become detached from our external ones — we lose our ability to reason. (There are many historical, fatal examples of lost people who become outright delusional.)
Despite the Internet’s breakdown of geographic barriers to communication, geography still has a significant impact on how artists break, and how we discover them. So many indie artists rely on their local music scenes — an inherently spatial designation — to build up audiences, resources and momentum that are then recognized by A&Rs and promoters at the national or global level.
A music festival is one of the most powerful examples of a highly spatial man-made experience.
Duh, you might be thinking. Music festivals take place in a real-life, three-dimensional space. No-brainer. But hear me out. Festivals are spatial not just because there is space, but also because there is movement.
It starts with the journey to the festival itself. In 2015, Nielsen found that fans traveled an average of 903 miles to attend a single festival.
Once you’re on the festival grounds, movement is the main source of both emotional and financial value. Unlike with a concert in a single venue, you’re rarely stuck to being part of just one audience watching just one artist in a festival setting. Instead, you walk from one stage to the next throughout the day. Perhaps you stop by the outdoor bar or food court for a drink or snack break between sets, while taking in the organized chaos of the similarly free-flowing audiences around you. It’s spontaneous, exploratory travel.
The 2017 paper “Socio-spatial authenticity at co-created music festivals” discusses how these acts of “stumbling” upon something new in a spontaneous way and “drifting” aimlessly from one location to the next are critical to the festival experience. “Drifting serve[s] a functional purpose by providing a means of sampling as much as possible from what is on offer without collapsing into a state of anxiety,” write the authors, adding that “in a wider social context where work and productivity are highly valued, festivals provide a guilt-free opportunity to be non-productive, drift aimlessly and whimsically consume experience.”
This is precisely the “aura” or “atmosphere” of which so many people speak when they talk about the appeal of festivals: The act of drifting through a massive, carefully-mapped space, stumbling on incredibly talented and dynamic artists along the way.
2D livestreams remove the intuition of live events
In comparison to the fun but exhausting experience of attending a festival in person, “attending” a festival livestream seems so much easier and more frictionless. It’s a matter merely of opening up a new tab on your web browser or an app on your phone. And fans and artists all over the world can join in, as opposed to just those who can afford the time, money and energy to travel to a specific location for a period of time.
But while shrink-wrapping a 3D festival into a 2D plane might remove friction, it also removes intuition and delight by removing a sense of space.
Think about your standard virtual-festival experience on a platform like Twitch or YouTube. It’s a double-edged sword of interactivity that’s freer, yet also more restricted.
The chat bar on the side of the livestream allows fans to voice their own individual thoughts in a way that isn’t as easy to do in the homogenized group-think of in-person crowds. But it also flattens that expression into text. It falls short of the full range of how you’d express yourself at an in-person show — vocally, sonically and physically.
And ironically, this limited expression also feels noisier in the context of a chat room, as if every single fan at an in-person show were yelling a different sentence into the air at the same time. The noise-to-emotional-value ratio is too high.
What’s more, the majority of online festivals I’ve attended had no sense of the spatiality that one would experience in person. Every artist on the lineup performed on the same video screen and landing page, without the ability for fans to travel to different virtual “rooms” (private or public) or stop somewhere “on the way” in between sets for a break, group chat or other activity. The intuition and delight of movement and exploration were gone.
A three-part spatiality framework for online music festivals
How do we bring a sense of spatiality and exploration back into the virtual festival experience? There are three key elements to keep in mind: Presence, movement and mapping.
I adapted this framework from John Palmer, who wrote an incredible pair of articles on spatial interfaces and software. Virtual festivals are a great example of an online experience where, in Palmer’s words, “preserving the higher dimensionality makes it simpler and more intuitive, not less.”
1. Presence
Presence is the state of being with others in the same place.
In a livestream, the only sign of presence is usually the aggregate number of concurrent viewers displayed at the bottom of the screen. But presence isn’t just about data; it’s also about being able to see other people, other bodies, next to you. As Palmer wrote with respect to online co-presence: “Social media isn’t enough … none of our social apps are really enough. Because our current software is too plain, based on a purely utilitarian exchange of information.”
The core question: How can online festivals signal and visualize presence aside from aggregate numbers?
2. Movement
Movement comprises the ability not just to be present in a space, but also to move yourself and other bodies and objects freely.
For most virtual festival livestreams I’ve seen, there is no sense of movement because there is no sense of presence. Viewers can move text in a chat, but not themselves or other objects in a wider space. (Unless it’s intentionally built into the experience, switching between tabs on a web browser doesn’t count.)
The core question: How can online festivals preserve the intuitive sense of movement from in-person events?
3. Mapping
In the context of in-person festivals, mapping involves a sense of relationality — e.g. figuring out where one stage is located relative to other stages, and charting the easiest path to get from point A to B.
Aside from in-game concerts, almost no online festivals I’ve seen have woven in any sense of mapping or relationality. Instead, the livestreams are typically standalone videos, broadcast on a single landing page to the bubbles of artists’ or event organizers’ already-existing audiences.
It might be worth building something that viewers can explore and travel through, to retain more of their attention and make the experience more memorable — especially for several-hour events with dozens of artists on the lineup.
The core question: How can online festivals expand their own topography from a standalone video stream to a dynamic, interactive map that encourages exploration and travel?
Case studies
Below are some examples of online music, livestreaming and/or social experiences that preserve some or all of these three elements of spatiality.
1. Presence
A handful of entertainment apps illustrate a sense of presence through avatars.
For instance, the music livestreaming app Sessions — which Pandora’s co-founder and former CEO Tim Westergren launched in late April — displays colorful, animated avatars below the livestreaming video to represent every person who is viewing an event. Several Twitch streamers have also been overlaying user avatars onto their broadcasts for years, using tools like Stream Avatars. You may remember that the defunct social DJing app Turntable.fm also displayed colorful, dancing avatars for each user in a given room.
The approach isn’t new, nor is it perfect. But it comes close to visualizing how a crowd would look at an in-person show by adding bodily dimensionality, instead of reducing viewers to usernames and aggregate statistics. (This is in part why the avatar economy is a more practical topic to discuss today in the context of music, not less.)
2. Movement
There’s a reason why a growing number of event organizers are turning to games and platforms like Minecraft, Roblox and Fortnite to stage their virtual shows. It’s because game worlds have both interactive movement and mapping built in.
Let’s single out Travis Scott’s Fortnite show as an example. The show wasn’t amazing merely because it was one of the top artists in the world collaborating with one of the top games in the world. Nor was it amazing just because it attracted 27 million unique viewers.
It was amazing because the show literally moved you. To access the concert in Fortnite, you had to move your character and run to the right beach in time. (Charles Holmes shared in his amusing account for Rolling Stone that he got shot down three times by strangers in the game before he could even make it to the event.)
You were then blasted back a significant distance by the force of Travis Scott’s larger-than-life avatar landing on the ground like a meteorite, and had to follow his virtual self around the grounds to keep up with the scene. At one point, you were suddenly floating underwater with the rapper; at another, you were flying in outer space past Scott sitting on top of a planet, overlooking the old Fortnite map. All in all, you were moving, not just watching.
3. Mapping
Many 3D games like Fortnite, Animal Crossing and Minecraft are popular for online events because they’re inherently map-based and topographical, with the ability to navigate different locations in an extensive world, and even change elements of the world yourself (e.g. terraforming in Animal Crossing). In these worlds, events become destinations to travel to, not just a new browser tab.
But you don’t need a 3D or even animated game environment to build a compelling map around an event. Setting up features like different rooms with different kinds of content or viewing experiences can go a long way.
This kind of layout is already taking off in social media. Apps like Clubhouse, Houseparty and even Facebook Messenger Rooms allow users to jump painlessly from one room to the next, either as a speaker or as a spectator — paralleling the experience of sitting in on multiple simultaneous panels at an in-person conference, or hopping across different stages at a festival.
Only a handful of online festivals have adopted this multi-room layout for themselves. Mutek’s NEXUS experience — a multi-day online festival developed in collaboration with Currents.fm — included the ability for viewers not just to switch among different virtual stages, but also to create private, text-only viewing rooms with their friends. The Minecraft concerts that Open Pit organized with Brooklyn venue Elsewhere featured $5 VIP tickets that granted access to special VIP areas within their in-game venue, as well as to VIP-only channels in their Discord server.
A handful of apps outside of music take mapping to a new, playful extreme. For instance, Online Town enables people literally to walk in and out of small-group meetings on a virtual, game-like map, fading audio and video in and out the “closer” or “further” you are from a given meeting on the map. Mozilla Hubs instantly creates a new virtual, animated town or island for private group meetings to be “stranded” on. Spatial note-taking app Nototo (pictured below) allows users to generate 3D, topographical islands for different groups of multimedia notes — a layout that could be fun to build around a DIY festival or showcase event with multiple events going on simultaneously.
Altogether, these elements of spatiality — presence, movement and mapping — can open up whole new degrees of freedom and expression in livestreams for both artists and fans, and can preserve a sense of community, exploration and delight in the face of few real-life alternatives for events.