In addition to examples of the more interactive or participatory live concert experiences I have explored in the Venues portion of this site, I have compiled a list of some models outside of Eugene below.
- Musician and dancer Steve Reker and his band People Get Ready combine music and contemporary dance into a performance style that is uncommon in the indie music genre. In a New York Time review of a show of Reker’s in 2011, Kourlas (2011) notes, “Throughout ‘People Get Ready,’ Mr. Reker highlights the space itself, leaving room for sound to echo among the bodies and objects. In a sense, this really is a hybrid performance: it’s about music, dance and the air that holds them together.” Also profiled on NPR’s All Songs Considered, host Bob Boilen describes the band’s performance at this year’s CMJ Music Marathon as “one of the most magical performance music pieces I’ve even seen in my entire life.” Boilen discusses the experience in detail from about the 20-minute mark to the 25-minute mark in this fantastic podcast.
- I found multiple examples of the live concert experience being reinvented in some way through the aid of YouTube. One example is YouTube Symphony Orchestra, which is an orchestra assembled through open auditions on YouTube that has thus far culminated in two live performances. These concerts were available by live stream on YouTube. According to Wikipedia, ” The live stream of the Grand Finale concert at the Sydney Opera House was the largest live stream YouTube ever made, connecting 30.7 million streams on computers and a further 2.8 million streams on mobile devices.”
- The project Just Like Jazz was a collaborative project between Birmingham City University and Scarborough Jazz Festival in 2009. The facilitators, who are media academics at the University, used the project as a platform to document the festival moment-by-moment, allowing people who couldn’t attend in person get a sense of what the festival might have been like.
- From livemusicblog.com: “Live Music Blog.com is a website featuring a blog, podcasts, and music news all obsessively dedicated to the best in live music these days. We cover bands that know how to play live, which means you’ll see some jamband, indie rock, electronica, freak-folk, post-jam, afrobeat, post-rock, math-rock, and anything that’s likely to be a bit experimental. We tend to like the stuff that falls outside of the mainstream, with no clear definition of what that really means anymore.”
- Here is a list of six music social network websites.
- Bandwidth, also a music social network, is a “user community of music lovers” based out of the nonprofit music venue Band On the Wall in Manchester, England. The network allows members to re-watch concerts they have attended in person by later streaming them from home, organize social engagements around concerts with other members, and more.
- The Baltimore, MD club The 8 x 10 allows concert-goers to purchase live recordings of concerts they have attended immediately after the show.
- In my fall 2012 class Cultural Administration, taught by Professor Phaedra Livingstone, students were required to complete group projects based on a fictitious arts nonprofit of their own design. My group developed a nonprofit music and art community space we called The Venue. The Venue encourages attendees to engage with the music more deeply by contributing artwork for display made in response to concerts, invites bands that perform to also teach art workshops to attendees, and asks bands to perform improvisational sets based around themes suggested ahead of time by the audience. If there is a venue out there in the real world that employs similar methods of audience engagement, I haven’t found it yet, but I would really like to!
Poster I made for a fictitious Venue event
- Finally, I discovered this website, a blog which looks at the some of the very same questions I have for this project. This blog also appears to be a school project by an author named Tara M. Tara M. discusses audience engagement at a Snow Patrol concert in Sheffield, UK on February 7th, 2012. She discusses the audience’s feeling of participation at this concert, which was encouraged through the use of Twitter, camera projection of the audience onto large screens, and audience members’ self-documentation of the concert on their phones.
Best Show Ever 