If you’ve been missing out on the thrill of a live concert and haven’t embraced a livestream, Spotify is giving you that chance with five artists over a month.
The pandemic has made a dent on much of what we loved to do with travel deeply affected, but it’s also affected watching our favourite bands in person. With Australia on lockdown, international acts are largely a miss, making concerts a local thing only, and while that’s not bad, it means you mightn’t get to see all of the bands you normally like.
But if you miss the international act, online concerts might have been a bit of a salvation, providing a kind-of return to normality, even if it’s not quite the same experience.
We’ve seen numerous concerts pop up over the past year on various services, and Tidal offered a few concerts over the past year, but now another streaming player is getting in on that fun, with Spotify set to offer a few with international artists over the course of the next month. However, much like a real concert, you’ll have to pay for a ticket.
It’s something Spotify says will be an intimate performance with select artists, even though we’ve not heard if the concerts are limited in a number attending, and are pre-recorded anyway, so the smaller numbers of a typical limited concert hardly seem relevant since no one is actually attending in real life. Rather, the Spotify Virtual Concert Experience will offer pre-recorded streams from places the artists love to play in, with streams happening at different times.
Unlike some of the other streams that have popped up over the past year, these reportedly won’t be recorded — even if they have been prerecorded — and are meant for you to buy a ticket and attend virtually, much like if you were at the concert yourself.
Artists in Spotify’s Virtual Concert Experience include The Black Keys, Rag’n’Bone Man, the Bleachers’ Jack Antonoff, Leon Bridges, and Girl In Red, and they’ll perform each week in that order. Venues will range from small venues such as the Blue Front Cafe in Mississippi, which is where The Black Keys’ performance will take place, while Rag’n’Bone Man will be at London’s Roundhouse, Leon Bridges at the Gold-Diggers Hotel, and Antonoff will perform on a city bus going from New York to New Jersey.
Each concert is pre-recorded, and seems to offer four times, one of which is suited more for a night concert in specific regions than others, but each is available all the same, with 8pm geared at Australians, but also streams at 5am, 10am, and 1pm in Australia, as well.
To watch the virtual concerts, you’ll need a Spotify account, but because this isn’t a part of the Spotify experience in general, you’ll also need to pay $19 for the stream just like it’s a real concert you’re attending.
They’ll run every week starting from May 27 at Spotify Live, and may well be a way to guide you back into the live concert experience, though honestly, we’re just looking forward to getting back in the halls and venues and listening to our favourite acts perform. Nothing can really take that place just yet, though we’ll keep on looking for something that genuinely recreates that intimate venue experience all the same.
