The rise of the virtual livestreaming "tour"

It continues to boggle my mind just how long this period of uncertainty around the COVID-19 pandemic has been dragging on for, especially in relation to the future of live events.

Austin City Limits just got cancelled, the latest in a line of pandemic-induced festival casualties for the year. By some accounts, three to four indie venues across the U.S. are closing every week now. Socially-distanced and drive-in concerts are slowly trickling into daily life in person, but they’re certainly not the most enjoyable or realistic model for all artists and fans to adopt.

Meanwhile, artists and event organizers are continuing to experiment with livestreaming, seeking out innovative kinds of content and business models that can help the format sustain itself through and beyond the pandemic.

One particular trend has emerged that is worth studying for those who are committed to livestreaming for the long haul: The rise of virtual “tours.”

Artists as wide-ranging as R&B duo Lion Babe, deathcore band Suicide Silence, AR/VR music collective Miro Shot and singer-songwriter Zach Heckendorf are embarking on their own online livestreaming tours, in lieu of in-person events that were postponed or canceled.

Some of these artists are geo-fencing their performances, making each show on the tour available only to viewers in a particular city or country. Others are making “stops” and appearances on multiple different Instagram accounts owned by local venues, brand partners or music curators.

Some are charging admission, aiming at more loyal, existing fans; others have opted to hold their tour free of charge, with the goal of expanding their digital audience base.

Even if a tour is virtual, it still requires a lot of strategic and logistical planning on the part of artists and event organizers. “To put ourselves in the best position possible to be successful, it was essential to treat this like a REAL tour from a logistical sense: soundchecks and rehearsals, virtual meet and greets, and virtual press runs in each market,” Lion Babe’s manager le’Roy Benros wrote for DJBooth in regards to the duo’s virtual tour, which “stopped” at over 11 countries between May 2 and May 7. “Each show is intended to be localized by market. We wanted to give fans in each country their own unique show.”

There are some key differences between virtual and in-person tours in terms of opportunities for technological experimentation, content development and audience expansion — three of which I highlight below.

Artists can sustainably tap into previously overlooked markets

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the music industry was already engaging in important conversations about environmental sustainability (or lack thereof) in live events. A typical in-person tour cannot happen without the artist logging hundreds or thousands of miles on the road and/or in the air, nor without fans then logging hundreds more miles in transit (often via car or plane as well) to get to each show. That doesn’t even take into account the mounds of plastic waste that many major festivals and event venues produce.

While it still requires resources in the form of money and time for production and marketing, a virtual tour has a much lower carbon footprint. Due to the relatively borderless nature of the Internet, artists have the ability to route their virtual tours and make “stops” in markets that they either previously did not prioritize, or could not financially or logistically make happen in person.

For instance, Suicide Silence’s geo-fenced virtual tour has the band performing for fans in up to three cities in a single day — a schedule would otherwise be far from ideal for an in-person tour in terms of financial costs, environmental sustainability and physical and mental well-being:

With Zach Heckendorf’s virtual tour, the artist is able to target specific cities in a way that would otherwise feel plain nonsensical in real life. For instance, who would want to travel from Massachusetts all the way across the country to Oregon in just one day for a show, and then back the other way across the country to Tennessee the next day for the next show? The global nature of the Internet makes this kind of “cross-country” touring and audience engagement possible, or at least much easier to pull off with the right streaming partners.

Artists can strategically maintain a sense of “locality”

Ever since tour cancellations hit hard back in mid-March, I’ve been thinking about different ways to maintain a sense of “local” music communities and scenes online, without the ability to access such scenes in person.

The virtual tours that have happened so far provide three potential clues.

One, you can preserve a sense of “locality” through spatiality — i.e. by adopting a virtual environment online in which the show attendees can feel more co-present with each other, while having the freedom to move around and explore their surroundings. Perhaps the most obvious way to pull this off is to host concerts in 3D games like Fortnite and Minecraft that have virtual worlds built-in.

To my knowledge, no artist to date has performed a show in more than one game yet. Imagine how interesting that might look — a larger-than-life set in Fortnite one week, a pixelated appearance in a Minecraft festival another week, then an interactive game in Roblox the following week. The longer touring is held off due to the ongoing pandemic, the more of a concrete reality this kind of structure becomes.

In fact, Miro Shot is already doing something similar: The group is hosting each stop on their tour in a different immersive VR app, which enables them to build entirely different virtual worlds and user experiences for each show. Announced “venues” for their tour so far include Sinespace and AltspaceVR, both of which also have desktop apps available for fans who can’t access VR headsets.

Another way to localize virtual tours is to use IP address tracking to geo-fence each show only to people in a specific market, as Suicide Silence is doing for their tour and as other artists like Laura Marling have done for one-off concerts in recent months. Planning for multiple viewings of a single livestreamed show across different time zones — as Travis Scott did with the five separate viewing times for his Fortnite show — is also an effective strategic move to tailor a given experience to local behaviors, while reaching as international of an audience as possible over time.

Or, if you don’t want to build entire virtual worlds from scratch or cut off shows from people in certain geographies, you can host each show of your tour in tandem with partners who take an inherently local, focused approach to their content curation. Lion Babe partnered with the likes of S.O.B.’s in NYC, Paradiso in the Netherlands and Alchemy in South Africa for their Instagram Live performances; Heckendorf is taking a similar approach, partnering with a mix of local music venues, bookstores, radio stations, startups and other small businesses in each city represented on his itinerary.

In these situations, venues that already have reputations as local curators — especially those with a track record of supporting underground or independent artists, or with a particular genre bent — make the best partners. To take an NYC-specific example: Elsewhere, Trans-Pecos and Rockwood Music Hall arguably have more of a reputation as local curators in their own right than Madison Square Garden.

Virtual shows can act like press appearances for new fans…

Even though virtual touring is relatively new, there are already notable differences across artists when it comes to audience development goals.

I actually don’t think of a virtual tour that happens for free via a series of livestreaming appearances across different Instagram channels (e.g. Lion Babe) as a concert tour in the traditional sense. Rather, it’s more appropriately compared to a radio tour, or to a series of press appearances.

On traditional, in-person radio tours, artists travel across the country to meet with local radio DJs and curators, talk about their new or unreleased music and perhaps give a performance that is then broadcast over the airwaves and/or uploaded to YouTube. The goal is not just to promote the artist’s music, but also to help expose the artist to new audiences to help drive streams and physical sales.

While virtual tours across Instagram accounts don’t involve driving hundreds of miles to meet with local influencers in person, their value proposition to artists often feels quite similar, in terms of the opportunity to expose their music and share more context around their work to wider audiences online, targeting one specific market or community at a time. Its end result — more social media followers and streaming listeners — makes it more akin to press and publicity than simply to a performance.

Lion Babe’s RSVP flow for her virtual tour solidified this importance of audience development: In addition to exporting each event to their calendars, fans had the option of following Lion Babe and the partner venue accounts on Instagram, as well as Lion Babe’s own profile on Spotify, to stay up to date with future shows.

Suicide Silence’s tour in particular is sponsored by several brands including Bandsintown, Fender, Sennheiser and Liquid Death. In an era where brand sponsorship of in-person tours has been dwindling for years, brands’ growing willingness to sponsor virtual concerts and tours can also help bolster artists’ press and audience-development efforts — not to mention their incomes.

This kind of audience development mindset around virtual tours can be powerful for artists even beyond a performance context. For instance, to commemorate the release of her latest music video for “Waiting For Me,” independent electronic artist and drummer Madame Gandhi recently posted a list of dates and times for IG Live conversations she is having with multiple artists, influencers and media outlets about the video. While the core focus is a music video and not a show, this is for all intents and purposes a virtual tour, as you can see in her Instagram graphic’s design:

… and/or like digital meet-and-greets with existing fans

If a virtual tour is structured more like a paid, in-person tour with hard ticket sales, then it’s more likely to be for the purpose of engaging already-existing, more loyal fans.

Suicide Silence solidifies this audience focus in the business model for their tour, which allows fans to purchase a ticket-merch bundle for $25 (or $10 for a ticket without a shirt). I’ve seen a few other virtual concert experiences that allowed fans to pay extra for access to special VIP rooms in Minecraft, to paid-only rooms in Discord or to individual meet-and-greet sessions with the artist online.

It’s worth noting that it’s possible to combine the two above approaches — expanding into new audiences through press appearances, and strengthening existing audiences through intimacy — into a single experience. For instance, while all of Lion Babe’s virtual tour was free for fans to attend, the duo also hosted virtual meet-and-greets on the venues’ IG channels for each show a week in advance. As Benros wrote in DJBooth, fans were encouraged during these meet-and-greets “to take selfies on IG, suggest setlist songs, and engage with the artists, giving them a similar experience of an actual show in their city.”

The question of business models will need to come to the forefront when discussing the future of virtual tours and of livestreaming at large. According to Pollstar‘s latest livestreaming chart, only one of the top 50 livestreaming concerts of the past few months was paid — namely BTS’ Bang Bang Con, which might just be the best-selling online paid livestream concert ever at $20 million in revenue.

That revenue tier is achievable only for a fraction of the top 1% of artists in the world. For everyone else, a more regular, incremental business model for online shows makes more sense, and is necessary for most artists to be able to continue paying their bills with their creative work. Virtual tours — which are inherently longer-term and more episodic in structure, and much more technologically and geographically flexible than their in-person analogs — will play a central role in determining the kinds of business models that will endure over the next few months.