It’s not my intention to make a dire prediction here. I don’t want to forecast the end of the live-music business – completely – as we’ve known it. Others of much higher pay-grades have rightly stated that humans are social creatures and will want to get together again. When the danger of the current pandemic drops off, there will be some major parties. I think that’s likely to be correct.

In parallel with that, though, I think the present crisis has created a new level of comfort with live streaming. Folks who wouldn’t have readily considered it before were thrown into the freezing-cold pool of necessity, and they’ve realized that it’s not that hard to make something happen. Musicians who already have an established streaming presence are refining their offerings. On the other side of the screen, audiences seem to be highly receptive to receiving their experience in private, at home. As such, I think a new reality has suddenly sprung forth from its chrysalis, one in which audio humans will have to contend with a couple of surrounding concepts:

1. We are/ were gatekeepers of the live-music “flow” from artist to audience. That gatekeeping took a different form from other entities in the live-music world, but it was nevertheless present.
2. Technology that directly connects an artist to an audience removes gatekeepers…or changes their role.

For us, my meaning of gatekeeping is that we’re primarily translators. This is a little different than what we’re used to; We may have come to believe that “gatekeeper” really meant “curator.” However, anyone or anything that regulates an interaction, in any way, between the artist and their fans is a gatekeeper. For many players, the finer points of getting a PA system to work for them (especially at scales larger than a corner coffee shop) are too much to be bothered with. In that situation, craftspersons like us are needed to create an interface between what the artist wants and how to make the equipment achieve that want. By creating that interface, we regulate an interaction between the music makers and the music listeners. Hence, we’re gatekeepers.

Livestreaming bypasses the need for our translation.

I’ve written before about how engineering for live-music is a different discipline from studio mixing. I’ve talked about how our world is a “closed loop,” for example. There are also the physical realities of big enclosures, involved routing, deployment needs, large input and output power requirements, etc. The skills that we’ve developed for dealing with those needs, and the equipment we’ve amassed for serving those needs are barriers to entry.

But the barriers to entry for studio mixing, and the associated gatekeepers for that world fell a long time ago, as far as many musicians are concerned. Further, livestreaming is essentially studio mixing done for a remote audience:

• There’s no feedback loop to worry about at “FOH,” because the audience is effectively listening to playback (it’s just that the playback is very near in time to the original sonic event).
• The listener supplies their own playback equipment, so there’s no need for the streamer to worry about loudspeakers, or loudspeaker processing, or deployment, or if it’s too loud here or there.
• Because the listener also supplies their own room, and the loop is open, acoustical worries and stage bleed are much less of an issue.
• A livestream mix can be setup and tweaked for hours before the broadcast starts, with the full ability to record a test mix, listen to it, fix it, and then continue iterating. The need for high-speed mixing skills can be almost totally obviated in some cases.

What does this all mean?

As I said, my desire is not for dire predictions. I don’t want to say that any particular outcome definitely will happen. I do think, though, that we need to be ready for our roles to shift.

Some of us will get to mix livestreams for people who still would rather that someone else handle the console. Being more fully ready to support livestreaming in parallel with in-person events is probably a smart move.

We also need to be ready, I think, for a further hollowing out of the middle of our industry. I think folks will still hold bigger ticket events as special treats, but it’s entirely possible that artists will lean much more heavily on the livestreaming direct connection for more shows. (Think about it – livestreaming removes the need for a lot of venues that folks play. All you need is a big enough room to hold the band, and even if you want a wider shot, you still don’t need as much space if there’s no audience in the room.) We may find ourselves transitioning to much more of a consulting role, where we get folks set to run their own shows and then help them if something misbehaves.

And if I were to open a venue, I would make very sure that support for excellent streaming was just as high a priority as the sound for the folks in the room.

“For the world is changing: I feel it in the water, I feel it in the earth, and I smell it in the air.” – Treebeard, “The Return Of The King”