Dressing up and clubbing from home
People are paying real money to get into party mode at virtual Zoom nightclubs
It’s only 5 p.m. on a Saturday in Los Angeles, but the Zone — a16-room virtual club on the video conferencing app Zoom — is already in full swing.
“You’re late!” admonishes a bouncer with a glowing Celtic symbol on her forehead, peering through a pixelated window at a gaggle of new guests tuning in from their homes, making sure they are properly outfitted, both with drinks and in looks. She clicks them into different “dance floor” chat rooms, where revelers in colourful costumes shimmy to a livestreamed DJ set while two fluffy puppets manoeuvred by an invisible hand waltz in each other’s arms.
In an additional networked room, a man in a pink wig leads a spirited conversation about sustainable farming. At the end of the night, the party’s host invites everyone to the “hot tub” room — swimming attire required. Shirts are peeled off and snorkels pulled on as guests gamely play along.
“Someone has handed Zoom to us, and we’re just playing around,” observes one guest, dressed in a Santa hat, who claims to be the son of a pig farmer turned crypto-investor. “This is the cuttingedge, and I’m confident it will bloom into something else.”
Welcome to the new era of clubbing under quarantine. Somewhere on the internet, a virtual party is always going down. As in Asia earlier during the outbreak, livestreaming has emerged as an ad hoc emergency support system for the flailing entertainment industry across Europe and the U.S. Musicians across every genre are broadcasting sets from their bedrooms on platforms such as Instagram Live alongside donation links to their PayPal, Venmo, or Patreon accounts.
Such brands as Beatport and Amazon Music have partnered with Twitch to launch marathon sessions featuring prominent DJs like Diplo and A-Trak, with the former raising $180,000 (U.S.) for the AFEM (Association for Electronic Music) and WHO’s COVID-19 funds on March 27 and 28.
E-busking
The coronavirus crisis has hit the music and nightlife industry hard: With event cancellations stretching through the lucrative summer festival season, an economic model increasingly reliant on touring and live shows has imploded.
Even after the lockdowns are lifted, a probable long-term contraction of the live music industry, which was projected to be worth $27.9 billion in 2019, has underscored how badly the current economic model is broken. It is unsustainable for working musicians — many of them gig workers without employerbased safety nets. Some artists doubt that livestreaming is inherently emancipatory, or even financially viable.
“I resent the idea that musicians have to invent an awkward new medium of performance — and busk for tips — when people could just buy their record,” says artist and tech researcher Mat Dryhurst, who coined the term “ebusking” to describe this practice. “The tech isn’t there to make it more engaging than, say, radio,” he continues. “Even in this charitable climate, it isn’t producing impressive financial results.”
Beatport’s fundraising success seems an outlier so far. On the lower end, smaller underground DJs may pull in $50 a stream, while bigger artists such as Erykah Badu, who broadcast a concert March 23 from her home in Dallas, Texas, pulled in around 10,000 people paying $1 each. While far from what a traditional concert would earn, it was enough for her to do a second one, charging $2, to support herself and her band.
Accessing youth culture
Creating a safe space for the LGBTQ community to connect with each other is critical to a virtual party called Club Q, which recently earned the title of hottest club on Zoom and has amassed almost 40,000 followers on Instagram.
Run by a crew of four Toronto-based friends, the nightly party is a glittering spectacle of drag queens, queer club kids, and guest DJ sets from such celebrities as Charli XCX, Tinashe, Kim Petras and HANA. Keeping the club accessible is essential to its ethos. “We have access to people who can’t attend clubs because they have children, social anxiety, disabilities, or live in places that don’t have clubs,” says one of the party’s founders, Andrés Sierra. “We want to maintain this equality, with no elitism.”
Thus, the party does not charge a cover and has, so far, through voluntary audience donations and a one-time Red Bull Canada sponsorship, covered its expenses (including a professional Zoom subscription to boost capacity to 1,000 people, as well as DJ fees) that can run from $500 to upwards of $3,000 a night.
As the party grows, brands have started to eye the popular platform as a new way to access youth culture.
“Companies don’t have a lot of branding opportunities right now, and no one wants to see an influencer advertising, like, hair gummies,” says co-founder Brad Allen. So far, Club Q has collaborated with Paper magazine on a few nights, which helped pull in more celebrity DJs, and is waiting to see if additional partnerships emerge, says Allen.
“Without knowing how long the quarantine will be, brands don’t know if they should throw money and commit to this as something for the future.”
Hacking the platform
In some senses, if you’ve been to one Zoom club, you’ve been to them all. The platform’s layout is always the same: A featured musician performs a set underneath a carousel of small windows with voyeuristic views into people dancing or lounging in their homes. Channelling the true spirit of nightlife, it’s up to the crowd to create the party’s vibe via active participation — turning down the lights, throwing on a costume, talking to each other in the group chat. These social interactions can feel new and awkward, but we’re hungry for it.
What we’re really paying for is this community, along with a sense of discovery and participation.
“Parties are at the heart of most of what is good in human life: love, friendship, fun, escape, spiritual exploration, etc.,” writes London-based Ted Cooke of the Co-Reality Collective in a blog post. “It’s obviously therefore of great importance that we continue partying despite physical distancing.” But how? “It’s not like anyone was attending online parties before the lockdown.”