Are These 3 Post-Covid Concert Trends The “New Normal”?
We examine how many of our place-holder music events carry on to a post-Covid world.
As the world’s first strictly-digital festival season winds into winter, clouds of uncertainty continue to loom over the live events industry. Mirroring sporting events, college lecture halls, and courtrooms, concerts will be limited capacity or go audience-free altogether for the foreseeable future.
Some of the festival market’s most robust promoters are making ambitious in-person plans for 2021. Dance purveyor Insomniac announced a physical version of its flagship EDC Las Vegas event for May, and even sold out of tickets for Day Trip fest in Los Angeles next July. However, with the CDC & WHO projecting a viable Covid vaccine becoming widely available by next summer at best, the reality of such plans remains to be seen.
Many of us are itching to reclaim our rightful corner of the dance floor, be that at our favorite local live music venue, club, festival grounds or chronically-packed stadium, but the steep price of these luxuries are frivolous in perspective. The CDC confirmed more than 293,000 new COVID cases in the last 7 days, with total COVID-related deaths eclipsing 203,000 (as of Friday Sept 25).
The live music world swiftly pivoted as the world shut down, though not always with flawless agility. Drive-in raves have offered a socially distant consolation to its densely populated predecessors. Live-streamed sets & festivals on digital domains like streaming platform Twitch have proven improbably popular as both alternative revenue streams and promotional weapons for ardently online musicians.
Psychologically, the general public’s outlook on the safety of live events has become an enormous moral and ethical quandary not just for fans, but for organizers. How many of these shifts will become part of the norm, and how many will become a distant memory once the pathogens prove defeated?
Read Bella Bagshaw’s full deep-dive on our website now.
