The Bizarre Isolation Of A Concert Web Stream

The notion of streaming live music concerts online is not a new one; musical acts and concert distribution outfits have been looking for ways to conflate a strong live presence with a strong presence online. Any discussion of concert streaming is bound to conclude that even an HD-quality screen, Bose-speaker-equipped system cannot provide the concert-going experience of well, actually being there. Real concerts will always be louder, sweatier, more fun, more soaked in alcohol, more…you know…real. If you’ve ever used Skype—or any other video chat program—you’d quickly agree with me; talking to someone through a digital channel doesn’t quite measure up to a face-to-face exchange.

All that said, I won’t deny that I’ve spent large chunks of my time hunched over my desk watching YouTube clips of Drive-By Trucker shows and James McMurtry shows. In some sense, I might argue that this kind of rabid clip-viewing habit is somewhat like an hors d'oeuvres to an entrée—like a pre-show warm-up before actually seeing the show.

But that’s not quite true. In many cases, these clips are more than that. Sometimes they can be a warning: I shouldn’t see this performer live—they’re temperamental, they’re bad live musicians, they have an awkward stage presence. Other times they can be informative: don’t expect this song to sound like the album track…expect this song to sound like an African drum collective, not the regular band. And other times, they can even provide an opportunity I won’t otherwise have. For example, an artist like James McMurtry usually sticks to touring around the Southwest and when he does it make it this far north—meaning the New York area—I’m usually away at school. But these Internet clips and streams don’t substitute for the real deal. I learned this the hard way last night.

~

On a whim (or, to be more accurate [and honest], because it popped up in my Twitter feed) I recently tuned in to a live show by Jenny Owen Youngs, a Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter, whose recent single “Great Big Plans” I featured in a Saturday Songs post this past summer. Youngs just so happened to be playing a house show somewhere up in the Berkshires, which the host thoughtfully decided to stream online through Livestream—a (duh!) live stream website. Judging from the general set-up of the concert, the owner of the house seemed like an old hand in setting up shows with artists, but was not so familiar with the idea of streaming a show online.

At first, the experience was not unlike that of watching a prerecorded late-night television show—particularly that The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, in which Ferguson makes continual meta-reference to the actual television audience, going so far as to deliver his opening monologue directly to the camera. At Youngs’s show, the show host as well as Youngs made references early on in the concert to my existence—the anonymous, invisible Internet user watching through the camera—but then, to my sort-of-bewildered surprise, it was as if myself and all the other streamers (there were roughly 50 of us throughout the show) had dropped off the face of the earth. Youngs gave not so much as a mention of the camera in the room or the Internet after the first ten minutes of the show. (An admission: there may have been a few whispered audience asides regarding my web existence at the show; some of the onstage banter was a just too quiet to hear on my computer.)

The show quickly became a bizarrely isolating experience. I was sitting in my room, lingering over the first act of Hamlet (still in the middle of that act, I’m sorry to inform you…) and listening with my headphones and watching this tiny, pixilated version of Jenny Owen Youngs on my computer screen and feeling just a little sorry for myself. Much of her solo acoustic act, it turns out, is engaging with the audience and having all these little mini-conversations and just generally opening up a warm-hearted dialogue between herself and the audience. The audience…of which I was paradoxically a part…and yet not so much a part. Perhaps in another concert setting, it would not have mattered so much. During Death Cab for Cutie concerts, Ben Gibbard isn’t about to be curious about BBQ joints in western Massachusetts, if you know what I mean.

But beyond the issue of being mute, there was the issue of having a rather inflexible neck and an acute case of tunnel vision. Several times over the course of the show, Youngs made reference to an excited baby in the audience. The baby, of course, was sitting with its mother somewhere behind the camera, in a place wildly out of my framed experience. You’d think this would be an isolate incident, but Youngs referred to the small child like clockwork, the visible audience in the frame craning their heads around to look in a way that I could not.

But that, to be honest, didn’t bother me that much; I could get over not being able to turn my head and see the cute baby behind me. What did bother me was the slide to the left made by the camera with a little less than 20 minutes left in the show. It seemed that the host, or whoever was responsible for the streaming, had not adequately tightened the camera to the tripod before the show and it ended up slipping loose and twisting away from the stage.*

Thankfully, the camera didn’t pan so far to the left that Owens left my sight altogether; she remained at the far right of the frame, while the camera repositioned itself with the host of the house show at the center of the shot. He looked up at the camera few times, clearly noting the new Internet perspective, but made no move to help. 

*The host of show contacted me and corrected my interpretation of the action; it was not a loose camera, but rather an ill-placed foot by one of the guests that caused the camera to swing the way that it did.

~

But there are still other downsides to this sad concert experience. An obvious one, which I’ve already alluded to, is the loneliness of it all. I suppose I could gather a group of friends and sit down to watch an acoustic show like Youngs’s show, but that still really wouldn’t substitute for the energy of actually being in the audience itself. If there’s anything I notice when I’m at live shows, it’s that you learn an awful lot from the audience. I don’t mean that in a literal way—I’m not sitting there scribbling theorems or historical dates—I mean that in the sense that you learn how to listen when you’re physically at the show. If you’re at a rock show and no one is head bopping or jumping up and down—then you probably won’t be egged on to do so yourself. But if, on the other hand, you’re sitting in neat rows of seats and everyone is standing and cheering and clapping to the beat…well, you’re probably not going to sit there fiddling with your smart phone.

Of course, I learned a little from the audience at Youngs party. But that little didn’t amount to very much. I could sometimes get a vibe from the audience, but I was never moved to applause or head bopping by any sense of camaraderie. (There was one episode of toe-tapping, however, during Youngs’s song “Led To The Sea.”)

And what should I have done about the birthday issue? Halfway through the concert, three people in the audience discovered that their birthdays all fell within that same week. Youngs naturally suggested that everyone sing “Happy Birthday” at the end of the show, which they did. And I sat there silent—partly because it would have been silly to be singing “Happy Birthday” alone in my dorm room (does that reek of loneliness or what?) and partly because I just didn’t really witness that birthday connection in the first place. My lack of connection with this show was reinforced all the more once the show officially ended after birthday wishes and people started milling around the room. Obliviously, people walked straight in front of the camera and paid me not a whit of attention. “Come on!” I wanted to say. “There’s a freaking camera there! You’re on the Internet right now!” But no one listened…and then the camera was turned off.

~

So would I do it again?

Yes. But I’ll be ready for it next time. Firstly, I won’t expect a whole lot from the experience. I will know going in that the viewing experience itself, hosted through Livestream, will be pixilated and lacking in quality sound. It will probably also be pretty isolating and not a little weird.

But, on the other hand, it will show me something that I wouldn’t find on an audio CD or even on YouTube. A web stream would allow me to gather some basic ideas about how an artist performs and whether or not it might be worth seeming them live (live for real).

All I’m saying is that if James McMurtry wanders onto one of these concert web streams anytime soon, I’ll be there.