The modern age might not look like The Jetsons told us it would (yet), but there are companies around the globe working to push pop culture in new and largely unexplored territories, including virtual reality (VR).
This week, Universal Music Group (UMG) and iHeartMedia entered into a one of a kind partnership to begin exploring the possibilities of combining virtual reality technology with live concert experiences. Think about it: Why buy a flight, catch an uber, and sleep on the ground for a week to experience Coachella when you could watch from the comfort of your parents’ basement?
According to a press released pushed to the public on Monday, the companies will leverage their respective strengths – including UMG’s deep music expertise, world-renowned roster of superstars and new artists and industry-leading music library, and iHeartMedia’s 245 million monthly broadcast listeners, nearly 90 million digital uniques, 80 million social followers, roster of nationally-recognized marquee events, and the consumer relationships its personalities have with listeners – to drive innovation in both music and VR. The companies will create entertainment experiences that leverage cutting-edge technology, making immersive VR performances and experiences accessible to U.S. audiences for the first time at scale.
Additionally, UMG and iHeartMedia will invite brands to partner with them to develop, produce and distribute these one-of-a-kind entertainment experiences, using integrated approaches to connect their brands and products to both artists and consumers. This means advertising will be present, but hey – the future doesn’t pay for itself.
The first big goal of this partnership is to offer unique VR experiences with at least one UMG artist at each major marquee iHeartMedia event in 2016, including the iHeartRadio Music Awards, the iHeartRadio Country Festival, the iHeartRadio Summer Pool Party, the iHeartRadio Fiesta Latina, the iHeartRadio Music Festival and the iHeartRadio Jingle Ball Tour, with this first-ever VR music series launching at the iHeartRadio Music Awards on April 3, 2016. The companies will collaborate on full shows from four individual artists, shot and distributed in VR, at the iHeartRadio VR Concert Series held at the iHeartRadio Theater in Los Angeles.
The artists chosen to be involved in this series have not yet been revealed.
“At UMG, we are focused on harnessing cutting-edge technology to pioneer new creative and commercial opportunities for artists, labels and fans,” said Lucian Grainge, Chairman and CEO of Universal Music Group. “By combining iHeartMedia’s music events and hundreds of millions of listeners with the ability of our artists to forge powerfully emotional connections with their fans, we are ideally positioned to use VR technology to create authentic experiences that benefit our artists, consumers and marketing partners.”
“Our greatest strength at iHeartMedia is that we curate for our listeners – in this case, working with UMG to create a completely new entertainment experience using state-of-the-art VR technology,” said Bob Pittman, Chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia, Inc. “And now, as advertisers seek to tie their brands and products to music and artists in innovative ways, we can use our industry-leading reach and best-of-breed music events to unlock the combined power of music and VR as a revolutionary marketing tool. We’re excited to work with UMG in a partnership unlike any in the music and entertainment industry.”
The hype surrounding VR technology, particularly that being marketed and sold by Oculus Rift, has been on the rise for the last several years. The success of this campaign could open the door to a number of new avenues for exposure and even financial gain if executed well, but right now anything is possible.
I woke up at 5 AM on a summer morning to the sound of rain pounding on my windowsill, building in intensity by the second. Two hours later, I arrived at Manhattan’s Webster Hall, armed with ponchos, umbrellas, and enough food to survive an apocalypse. Despite the torrential downpour, I took a rush hour train, navigated the subway system by myself for the first time, and walked in circles in NYC’s East Village just to sit outside of the venue for 12 hours.
Nobody seemed to understand. Passerby’s stared at me as I sat alone on a city sidewalk with the bitter wind chill and rain drops soaking through my clothes and into my skin. My mother called me every 20 minutes with a sense of worry and confusion in her voice, wondering why her child would do something so crazy. My friends rolled their eyes when I told them where I was…and they all asked, “Why?”
Why did I want to wait half a day to see the band PVRIS? It is because concerts give me the self-confidence that I have been unable to find in any other section of my life. Being in that crowded venue allots me a few hours to be myself, but the waiting in line and finding new friends can be just as exciting.
As the line wraps around the block, I share my ponchos with a few fans who soon become friends. The small talk slowly turns into conversations usually shared with best friends after months (maybe even years) as trust is built up. Before I know it, we are exchanging stories of middle school bullies who left us crying on the bathroom floor and how it fueled our internal fire to become better than those broken fragments.
Suddenly, all the weight on my shoulders is lifted. How is it that these people who were just strangers a little while ago are the reason I feel less alone? I can’t even begin to tell you about the relief that comes from knowing that someone else has fought off the same demons as yourself. The concert community taught me not to be ashamed of the nights I spent questioning who I was or the petty mistakes that I kept hidden in the depths of my chest. And to think, all this empowerment before I even step inside the venue!
Once the wave of darkness overtakes the sweaty room, the real magic happens. For me, this isn’t the music. It’s those brief moments in between where the drummer and guitarists are tuning their instruments and the vocalist has to entertain the rambunctious crowd. While I’ve had a plethora of amazing encounters during these fillers, a few have sent chills through my bones despite the blazing heat created by being in close contact with sweaty kids.
Since this all started with PVRIS, it only makes sense that I talk about Lynn Gunn. In a music scene lacking in female representation, Gunn is the much needed bright light–even though she wears only black–that will inspire a younger generation of girls to pick up a guitar. Watching her on stage, I am mesmerized. Not only by her impeccable vocals, but by the confidence she has in herself that somehow makes me feel just as secure in myself. As someone who has struggled with identity for way too many years, there’s some comfort in seeing an openly gay female musician proudly sing a song she wrote for her girlfriend (Love, Robot vocalist and fellow role model Alexa San Román.) People say it gets better, but I only actually felt the potential for things to improve after seeing someone who has probably gone through similar tribulations and emerged on the other side.
Speaking of “the other side,” I must also bring up Tonight Alive vocalist Jenna McDougall. Like Gunn, McDougall transforms a concert from a night filled with music into one of hope and fading feelings of self-doubt. She doesn’t use the lulls in a set to just interact with the crowd, but to inspire them. On the Future Hearts Tour this past spring, McDougall adopted a mantra: “From this day, I refuse to live in fear of someone else’s judgement.” I may have been to a few shows on that tour, but the words hit just as hard each time. When she repeats this phrase with passion and asks the audience to recite it back, I scream it while tuning out the world around me. It’s one thing to hear someone else say it, but hearing the sentence roll off my tongue actually makes me feel and believe every single word.
Before discovering concerts, I was always a quiet, soft-spoken kid who hated seeing that reflection in the mirror. Then music came crashing in and welcomed me into a new world where I was encouraged to wear those pizza converse my friends made fun of me for and where nobody cared who slept on the left side of my bed. From the petty to major things, concerts gave me the confidence take the person I was inside the venue and bring her into the light of day.
I will forever be grateful for the songs, band members, and music-obsessed friends who broke through my thick skin and pulled out a person I never knew existed. Because of these events, I can look at myself and smile, because I love me just the way I am and I no longer live in fear of anyone’s judgement.
Emma stumbled into the music journalism field when she saw an ad for a blog in need of writers. Since that day in January 2015, she has been a founding member of the team over at ShuffleBeatMusic, a blog that interviews musicians and reviews shows. While cataloguing the success of performers helps her to stay engaged in the scene, Emma’s dream is to some day be on the other side of the industry. A self-taught musician who plays drums, guitar, bass, and keys, she has just recently formed the band Heartless Bones and hopes to grace the stages of Warped Tour someday. Of course, there must always be a backup plan. Emma is currently studying Public Relations and music business at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York. Wherever life leads her, it will always circle back to music.
It’s probably safe to assume that everyone reading this post has been to one or more concerts in their life where some band, be it an opening or headliner, took the stage and appeared to be unprepared for the performance at hand. Maybe their vocalist struggled to hit the notes that seemed to come so easy on record, or perhaps the band kept losing tempo and playing over one another. Whatever the case, I’m sure you wish you could have back those precious moments lost while hoping the group on stage would get their act together.
Many artists believe they are untouchable once they get on stage, but the owner of a British performance hall recently proved that idea to be false when he stepped on stage after 30 minutes of a headlining set to give Scottish musician Finley Quaye the boot. Don’t worry, it was all caught on film and the performance was being filmed for online broadcast.
According to our friends at Vanyaland, club owner Matt Roberts interrupted Quaye’s apparently improvisational set — which sounded like a an extend soundcheck — and told the crowd: “I am so sorry guys. I have worked in the industry 28 years, I have a reputation. And the reputation is, small as it is, but when somebody doesn’t turn up for soundcheck at three in the afternoon, and I smile… and then at 9 o’clock they turn up. And then I have a beautiful, beautiful crowd of people who I love, and then they come, and they fuck my stage.”
He then turned to the band, who remained on stage while Quaye retreated to the shadows, and said, “You guys, go home.”
Refunds were given to everyone in attendance, which was an announcement that made many applaud. Roberts then continued his speech, adding “The music industry and live music is beautiful. I suffer from alcoholism and stuff and I have issues in my life but I am professional. And I’m sorry I will not sit here and pollute my venue with bullshit.”
You can view a video of the performance above. Roberts appears around the three-minute mark.
This message should be a lesson to all performers that simply because you are on stage does not entitle you to act however you desire. There is a certain expectation of quality with any live performance, and those who do not deliver may be asked to find other venues to host their shows. Don’t let this happen to you.
James Shotwell is the Marketing Coordinator for Haulix. He is also a professional entertainment critic, covering both film and music, as well as the co-founder of Antique Records. Feel free to tell him you love or hate the article above by connecting with him onTwitter. Bonus points if you introduce yourself by sharing your favorite Simpsons character.
Hello, everyone. Thank you for taking a few minutes out of your day to join us for a little music industry discussion. We were not planning to run this particular feature today, but life has a funny way of telling you what needs to be done when you least expect it (as you will soon learn). If you have any questions about the content in this article, or if you have an artist you would like to see featured on this blog, please contact james@haulix.com and share your thoughts. We can also be found on Twitter and Facebook.
I was halfway through an editorial on stage lighting today when a new post from our friend Anthony at The Needle Drop caught my attention. In the clip, a fan wrote to Anthony asking him about his thoughts on cell phone usage at shows, and what he remembers from attending performances before smart phones. I was both fascinated and made to feel extremely old by Anthony’s response, as I had never thought of my life as having been lived in an era now known as ‘pre-smart phone,’ but I was also incredibly intrigued by the notion that such technological advancements have forever changed the way people experience live music. Before I ramble on, however, it’s only right that I share Anthony’s video first:
Most people discuss concerts and the age smart phones by beginning with the issues it presents, so that might as well be where we begin too. It’s no great secret or shocking revelation that cell phones causes light pollution, and any setting where a lack of lighting is used to set the mood is almost instantly ruined by the use of phones. Movies theaters are a common place to encounter this problem, but it can apply to concerts as well. When you’re waiting for a headliner to go on and the venue finally drops the lights, what is the first thing you notice? Phones. Lots of them. It could be any date of the tour in any city and there are at least a few people in the crowd that feel they absolutely must have the first few moments captured on their phones. Why? Who cares! It’s [insert band] and they were there, that’s all the reason needed to block the view of whoever is seated/standing behind them. Do people even watch these videos? If they do, does anyone ever ask themselves why they tried to film a clip while jumping up and down and holding a beer cup with their teeth. or do they simply hit delete and move on with their lives, never giving a second thought to the impact their actions had on other concert attendees? I hope for the former, but I assume the latter is far more often the case.
It’s not just light pollution, however, because if it were there would be far less people constantly complaining. Light is the tip of the iceberg of problems people have discovered in the age of smart phones, and it’s followed by an endlessly updating juggernaut known as social media. Between tweeting updates from the show, sharing photos on Instagram, capturing videos and pictures for Snapchat, checking email, texting with friends, and ever so often ignoring a phone call it’s not uncommon to see several people spend entire performances with their fingers wrapped tightly around a little glowing rectangle that refuses to go dim. You may even hear them complain to their friends and family about a lack of 4G, or that their ‘phone’s battery totally sucks,’ even though it’s simultaneously running a dozen apps that each require different bits of information to be shared from the device, bounced off a satellite, received by a computer, sent back via satellite, and returned to the phone within fractions of a second. Stupid, lazy technology. Why can’t you be perfect already?
Anthony talks about this a bit in his video, but there was a time not too long ago when none of this was common place at concert venues. The first sixteen years of my life I attended shows without ever seeing people with phones in hand, and even when they began to appear it wasn’t until closer to 2010 that their presence reached a point that it was, at times, overwhelming. That said, there have always been assholes in this world, and I am willing to wager that as long as there have been concerts there have been those who go to shows for all the wrong reasons and end up ruining the experience for others. Before phones, some of the common complaints overheard at shows dealt with noise levels from other people’s conversations and the pseudo tough guys who felt they could only express their excitement about the show be attempting to start mosh pits that never full took off. Instead, those tough guys ran into people who didn’t want to be covered in other people’s sweat, which gave that stranger a story to then convey to all their drunken friends, thus causing the aforementioned noise problem.
The worst noise problem I ever encountered was the first time I saw the band Mewithoutyou following the release of their sophomore album. It was a great release, but far more subtle and atmospheric than their raucous debut. As a result, several people in the audience who came with hopes of hearing music worth mousing to found themselves faced with an evening of acoustic instruments and sing-a-longs. They were respectful at first, for the most part, but as the evening carried on the number of random conversations taking place throughout the crowd began to build, which in turn considerably raised the overall noise level. You could see the frustration on the band’s face, but they powered on as all great bands do, and the moments I was able to make out through the white noise of distracted concert goers was sublime.
Noise pollution is still a problem today, but often it takes a back seat to smartphones because people are too caught up in their glowing screens to attempt a conversation with anyone by their side. That is one unintentional bonus to peoples’ obsession with their phones, I guess, but nine times out of ten I would gladly take a few loud voices over a room of glowing phones. You may disagree, and that’s okay too. Link me to your blog on this very topic and I’ll share it.
I’m not sure the music world will ever find a solution to the problems caused by smartphones, but there are those in the industry who are trying their best to curve its impact on the overall concert experience. Neutral Milk Hotel, for example, asks fans to not film or photograph any part of their performance. People still do, of course, but the number of people doing so are far less than they would be in a situation where no one had asked anything of the audience. People can follow instructions, believe it or not, but it’s needs to be presented in a way that does not come across as being too stern or threatening. As an artist, you have the power to try and downplay phone usage through leveraging similar tactics, but at the end of the day people are going to behave however they please. Treat fans with respect and ask them to do the same for each other, you never know what might happen.
For those of you reading this who stand in crowds instead of performing on stage, you also have the power to make a difference in these situations. Bullying or otherwise taunting those who use their phones extensively will get you nowhere, but taking the time to politely ask those around you to put their phone away is completely fine. They might not listen, of course, and in some cases they may even say some rather nasty things to you, but at least you will have expressed your opinion on the matter. You can also try to get to the show early enough that the number of people between you and the stage is low, which in turn lessens the likelihood of phones blocking your view later in the night.
I do think it’s important to note that not all cell phone use is bad. Back in April I had the opportunity to see Miley Cyrus perform at TD Garden in Boston, and at one point in the evening she asked everyone to pull out their phones as a way of illuminating the room. The visual that created, as I witnessed thousands of tiny screens bouncing up and down to booming top 40 production, is one I will never forget. Similar effects can be achieved in smaller venues too.
Additionally, several artists have begun developing apps that can enhance an individual’s concert experience. Dan Deacon, for example, created an app that syncs with and responds to his live show. A video of that application in action can be viewed below:
There may be days when it seems smartphone technology has backed itself into a creative wall, but I think we have only scratched the surface of innovation as far as the crossover between music and the little devices we all carry in our pockets are concerned. The problems caused by cell phone use at shows is bothersome, yes, but the possibilities for how those phones could be used to better the future concert going experience is almost too enticing too resist. The best thing you can do is take it upon yourself to be conscious of your own phone usage and encourage others to do the same. Some will listen, others will not, but at least you will have made an effort to better the world for everyone else.
