SHOW MUST GO ON

 

Dick Pountain /Idealog 313/ 17 Aug 2020 10:32

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 the Große Konzertscheue, Salzau, Germany -- but I heard it almost as well, and saw it far better, than if I’d been there. My sofa is easier on the bum than most hall seats. It was a free YouTube video, in HD quality, which I Chromecast to my LG smart TV that pushed the sound through my vintage hifi system (excellent though hardly audiophile: Denon amp, Castle speakers). The camerawork was exceptional, in the German manner, so I saw the players’ fingers on their instruments and facial expressions in a close-up never experienced at a live gig. I also avoided queuing for the cloak-room, and being surrounded by people eating steak and chips and chattering instead of listening. So was this virtual concert a satisfactory replacement for the real thing?

I won’t go all gushy about the excitement of travelling in anticipation, about sharing an enthusiasm with other warm, breathing human-beings (which was once true) but will instead 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 America and Britain (Holland is English), being paid a pittance by tight-fisted promoters. Are kids coming up today via Logic-Pro-on-bedroom-laptop and social media going to develop similar or equivalent skills: only time will tell, but many YouTube channels suggest perhaps 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+ a ticket to see acts at the South Bank, Jazz Cafe or Ronnie Scott’s. I don’t know what percentage of that gets to the musicians, but nor do I know what slice (if any) of YouTube’s ad revenue went to them for that video.

This applies even more so in the world of classical music. During lockdown in June I watched a week of excellent lunchtime concerts streamed from the Wigmore Hall, including a staggeringly fine ‘Winterreise’ by Mark Padmore and Mitsuko Uchida. The visibly empty seats brought home frighteningly just what the virus is doing to us. As regular attendees at the Wigmore we like to sit stage-side for which we pay £12 to £20 a head. I didn’t pay that for all those streamed concerts, though 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 are unlikely to pay as much to watch from your own sofa, providing your own refreshment, as you would to travel to a special event at a concert hall or club. And even the alternative ways to pay for online entertainment can be fraught because of the distinction between pay-per-view and subscription.
Streaming has two huge advantages, instant access without travelling, and a vast repository of past performances. Instant access can make it possible to sample performances that 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 defunct iTunes. I’m happy to pay £10/month for Spotify Premium which I use 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.

Movies and TV are more complicated. I don’t subscribe to Netflix, Prime, Hulu or the like, because they don’t have enough of what I like to justify another monthly bill. But I do buy or rent one-off showings of movies – for example hard-to-find oldies like ‘Tampopo’ or ‘Babette’s Feast’ – and I use BBC iPlayer and All4 to binge watch series (I’ve pigged out on all seasons of ‘Line Of Duty’, and all seven years of ‘30 Rock’).

If coronavirus changes the way we consume entertainment forever, market forces alone are unlikely to save ‘the talent’. The print publishing industry faced this problem for years over library lending, and they came up with PLR (Public Lending Rights) and ALCS (Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society) which collect royalties on behalf of authors fairly efficiently. I suspect similar institutions will need to be cobbled together to collect revenues from online service providers on behalf of musicians, and even perhaps starving Hollywood moguls (joke alert)...