DICK POUNTAIN
With theatres still closed, the only way to enjoy “live” performances from musicians is via your screen – and that brings its own problems
With theatres still closed, the only way to enjoy “live” performancces from musicians is via your screen – and that brings its own problems.
Last night I “attended” a superb jazz session by world-class musicians Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Dave Holland and Brian Blade. Admittedly, it happened 16 years ago in Salzau in Germany, but I heard it almost as well as – and saw it far better than – if I’d been there.
It was a free YouTube video, in HD, which I Chromecast to my LG smart TV, pushing the sound through my vintage hi-fi system (an excellent but hardly audiophile combo of Denon amp and Castle speakers).
The advantages over a live concert are easy to list. For a start, the camerawork was exceptional: I saw the players’ fingers on their instruments and facial expressions in a closeup that I’ve never experienced at a live gig. I also avoided queuing for the cloakroom and being surrounded by people eating steak and chips and chattering instead of listening. It turns out my sofa is far more comfortable on the bum than concert hall seats too. So was this virtual concert a satisfactory replacement for the real thing?
I won’t go all gushy about the excitement of travelling to a venue, about sharing an enthusiasm with other warm, breathing human beings (which was once true), but will focus on more pragmatic considerations. First off, those musicians got as good as they are through a lifetime of playing to live audiences in clubs all over the US and UK, being paid a pittance by tight-fisted promoters.
Are kids coming up today via LogicPro-on-bedroom-laptop and social media going to develop similar or equivalent skills? Only time will tell, but many YouTube channels suggest not.
Secondly, can a viable music scene be maintained through payment for online performance? I didn’t pay for that Salzau video, and had YouTube been charging I probably wouldn’t have watched it, not knowing how good it was going to be. On the other hand, I frequently pay £40 to see acts at the Jazz Cafe and Ronnie Scott’s. I don’t know what percentage of that gets to the musicians; nor do I know what slice (if any) of YouTube’s ad revenue went to them for that video. I can, though, safely guess which earns the performers more.
T his applies even more in the world of classical music. During lockdown, I watched a week of lunchtime concerts streamed from the Wigmore Hall, including a staggering
Winterreise by Mark Padmore and Mitsuko Uchida. The visibly empty seats brought home frighteningly just what the virus is doing to us. As a regular attendee at the Wigmore, I like to sit stage-side, which costs £12 to
£20 a head. I didn’t pay that for all those streamed concerts, although I did make a one-off donation.
The brutal truth is that the psychology of paying for streamed entertainment is very different from paying for live entertainment. Rightly or wrongly, you’re unlikely to pay as much to watch from your own sofa, providing your own refreshment, as you would to travel to a concert hall. Even the alternative ways to pay for online entertainment can be fraught due to the distinction between pay-per-view and subscription.
Yet streaming has two huge advantages: instant access without travelling, and a vast repository of past performances. Instant access can make it possible to sample artists you wouldn’t normally consider, and hence be educated and change your tastes – but only if it’s cheap enough that quitting ones you dislike after a minute or two doesn’t hurt too much. That was the difference between Spotify and Apple’s now-deprecated iTunes. I’m happy to pay £10 per month for Spotify Premium: I use it every day, not just listening to favourites while walking, but for finding new music or researching all versions of some tune. I wouldn’t do any of that were I paying per track.
M ovies and TV are more complicated. I don’t subscribe to Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu or the like because they don’t have enough of what I enjoy to justify another monthly bill. But I do buy or rent films – for example, hardto-find oldies such as Tampopo or
Babette’s Feast – and I use BBC iPlayer and All4 to binge-watch series.
If Covid-19 changes the way we consume entertainment forever, market forces alone are unlikely to save “the talent”. The print industry faced this problem for years over library lending, and it came up with Public Lending Rights and the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society, which collects royalties on behalf of authors. I suspect similar institutions will need to be cobbled together to collect revenues from online service providers on behalf of musicians, to say nothing of all those poor, starving Hollywood moguls.
The brutal truth is that the psychology of paying for streamed entertainment is very different from paying for live entertainment
If Covid-19 changes the way we consume entertainment forever, market forces alone are unlikely to save ‘the talent’