Technology has helped drive the popularity of music festivals, while also revising the experiences people have with live music, according to Brian Moon.
Events like the SnowGlobe Music Festival in California, Decadence New Year’s Eve in Colorado, and Bestival in the UK’s Isle of Wight will share a massive infusion of technology and social media: live streaming to expand views, new perspectives offered by custom-made camera rigs, mobile apps, and wearable listening systems that customize a user’s experience, and scannable RFID wristbands that help reduce wait time and limit ticket fraud.
What has not changed, however—from Woodstock to Coachella—is the festival industry’s effort to create an all-sensory experience “getting into the realm of sight, temperature, feeling, and smells,” says Moon, an assistant professor in the University of Arizona’s Fred Fox School of Music.
Moon answered a few questions about the changing culture of music festivals, and how such events are reshaping how people engage with the music industry via technology and social media.
In terms of technology, I also suspect that there are links between the ways people relate through social media, which creates bonds between fans as they document their festival experiences. For example, Coachella builds itself as a “music and arts festival” as a means of drawing attention that there is going to be more going on.
And I do see that music festivals pick up on the culture of the moment. For example, Woodstock seemed to reflect the peace and love movement in the 1960s culture. But festivals are also an alternative to the mainstream popular music culture.
Another way record labels or representatives of an artist are able to tell if an artist is going to break is through the use of Shazam (an app that identifies the media playing around you). Shazam is able to show the most “Shazamed” song in your particular area.
For instance, in Tucson right now, “Guys My Age” by Hey Violet has been Shazamed more than any other song in Tucson. With this data, a record label or artist representative is able to promote the artist or their music by showing this data in the hopes of getting it released nationally.
This is very different from pre-social media and the pre-internet era, because technology creates data that the industry can use which reflects actual taste and not instinct. In the past, record executives would instinctively know this song or artist was going to be a hit. But that led to repetitive-sounding music that often was the same thing time and time again. Now we have songs and artists that sound really distinct, and that diversity is in part because it’s possible for the data and technology to draw attention to people’s taste.
Technology has influenced the way we define a successful album. There was an interesting moment in the collaboration between Paul McCartney, Kanye West, and Rihanna with the song “FourFiveSeconds.” According to Rolling Stone, Kanye West tweeted that the single had nearly 100,000 downloads. But Paul McCartney was kind of like, “Oh, that’s all?” When he was a top artist, if you only sold that much, it wasn’t really a hit. Today we consider that one of the best-selling singles. The scale has changed, and that’s because you have access to an infinite amount of music types.
There is a sense that popular music festivals that began in the 1960s were designed for the baby boomers as an introduction to new musical tastes. But that often drives festivals in general. Festivals try to draw attention to the diversity of popular music at that moment. So, we may all bounce around to different genres, but there seems to be something about music festivals—particularly ones that are associated with a certain demographic—that are trying to validate a specific taste in music.
Also, earlier generations have a tendency to create links with the ownership of music through cassette tape and CDs. At the same time, radio is pulling us in a more conservative direction in terms of playing fewer songs with little diversity.
But the millennial generation associates music and music ownership with the internet and cellphones. For them, the access to music via the internet results in almost a paralyzing effect of having so many choices. For instance, with so many opportunities, if you choose restaurant A, you are missing out on restaurant B, C, or D. It’s similar with music. So, with access to such a variety of music, people sometimes feel like they’re missing out on it.
Source: University of Arizona