Erykah Badu blazes a new trail
Artist who has never taken the conventional route rethinks how she produces, plays and interacts with fans
Erykah Badu has always been a boss, but now she’s closer to a CEO. When the COVID-19 pandemic halted concerts and the music industry scrambled to adapt, the iconoclastic neo-soul singer and songwriter created a new artistic and business model, creating her own interactive streaming network less than two weeks after the country began shutting down in the spring.
“I’ve been touring for eight months out of the year for 22 years. This is the way that I had made my money,” Badu said. She had family to take care of, and crew who have been part of her team for two decades. So she created a highproduction, interactive live show from her home (The Quarantine Concert Series: Apocalypse, Live From Badubotron), charging fans $1 to watch. And then she did it twice more, charging a little more each time — three increasingly elaborate livestreamed performances in the space of a month, with costume and lighting changes, and fans voting on the set list and even what room she would perform in. In the last concert, she and her musicians appeared to be inside clear giant bubbles.
“Every day and night, I was working and moving and experimenting and learning from mistakes quickly and fixing them,” she said. According to a spokeswoman, over 100,000 people tuned in. And now she doesn’t even miss being on the road: “A little piece of me dies every time I have to leave my home.”
The process energized Badu, 49, a mother of three who lives in Dallas. “All of a sudden, I’ve been resurrected in some kind of way with new ideas and thoughts and releases of things that I didn’t even know I was holding onto,” she said. She had already started to branch out, in February, with her website Badu World Market, which offers merchandise and female-centered community. She plans to launch an apothecary line there next, and she’s taking classes to learn how to code.
In a video interview, Badu described her vision for a new livestream company. These are edited excerpts from the conversation. project is very much underway. It’s ambitious, but I think I can do it. I think I can help artists build a platform very similar to mine where everything lives there. We are driving all the traffic to our socials, to our chat rooms, to our merchandise and to our art, whether it’s performance art or comedy or visual art or fashion. We don’t have to abandon our other social media outlets, but we can incorporate them into our worlds and in ways that make it very easy for the user.
I’m also trying to convince the user or the audience that it’s OK to pay the artist directly. Because they’re so used to using the streaming services to do that, and we only get pennies (from the services).
But we’re also living in an era where capitalism is one of the enemies. So you have to be very careful to not become something that you
didn’t intend to become.
I’m coming up with that, and I’m coming up also with the energy to be comfortable with that. Maybe a monthly fee is better than a one-time fee. It’s very important for us to be focused and organized right now, and also having places to release feelings of guilt and the feelings of suppression and pain and distance. And a lot of those things are released through music. Just creating the right vibration around the market will help people understand why it’s valuable to us at all. yes. There’s nothing like human beings and real breaths and eye contact and hearing your voice reverberate off the back wall of the club, come back at you and hit you in the jugular. Nothing like that. There’s nothing like DJing at a club and having all the people at the same time’s heart rates go up when we hear a song from our childhood that we loved, or when a guest walks onstage and everyone goes crazy because they didn’t expect them.
But there’s also nothing like performing and filming and creating and delivering something in the same moment. And when you can pull that off successfully, everybody has to be on point in the room — all of the camera people, all of the musicians, myself as a bandleader and a director. We are performing a two- to three-hour live music video, and everything has to be on cue.
Everybody just exhales after it’s over, and we are just all quiet. We did it.
Oh yeah. If I was doing a live show anyway, I’m going to get paid what I’m worth at this time in my career. I had to build that reputation from February 1997 (when “Baduizm” was released) to now.
This is a whole new arena, and I’m willing to do the work. I’m going to have to build that reputation again to show this industry that I can deliver the things that I say I’m going to deliver, because there is a network in place already for this.
And me, as a woman and as a nonconformist, building something outside of that network, is always going to be difficult. I know that already. Now, they’ve got to figure out how we’re going to count my streams and deliver on time, and the publishing company had to get involved. I’m building a new machine. I may face a few obstacles.
But I’m not even thinking in those terms. I’m not in a rush — I don’t think it’s a race because I don’t think that there’s anyone else who’s doing exactly what I’m doing. I’m willing to study and learn how this thing works because I definitely want to be in this game.
People are used to seeing Erykah Badu, the brand. But they’re going to have to start getting used to seeing Badu World, the company, because that’s what I’m building.