Online concerts music to the ear during lockdown

Imaginechina

Were you watching Singaporean diva Stefanie Sun on Douyin, or Mandopop icon Lo Tayu on WeChat on Friday evening?

The answer depends on your age, gender, habit of Internet use, but it is without doubt that the two virtual concerts were the talk of the weekend.

The platforms calculated viewing results differently. Douyin calculated the total views of Sun's event to be more than 240 million by 9:30pm. WeChat counted that Lo's show has attracted somewhere around 41 million viewers by 11:50pm.

Only a week ago, legendary rapper Jay Chou broke streaming record by attracting nearly 100 million views through the re-screening of two old concerts on a number of different platforms.

"I'm not even a Jay Chou fan, but I did tune in for those two concerts for a little while," said Joyce Zhang. She has spent the last 59 days locked down with her husband, in-laws and two kids.

"Some friends invited others to join and watch together in our WeChat group, and it felt nice to have interactions with people outside my family, even if it's just virtual. At least I'm familiar with some of the songs, and it feels, temporarily, like I was there with many others."

The lockdown has undoubtedly brought enormous interest to virtual concerts, where audience try to regain a sense of community, and performers making up for canceled gigs.

A University of Oslo study published in "Frontiers in Psychology" June 2021 stated that "the performers' struggles making up for canceled gigs were shared by audience member who were being encouraged or forced to stay at home and to socially distance."

It examined the variables that produce social connection and feelings of oneness in virtual concerts during the pandemic.

That may explain the first boom in livestreaming concerts during this year's lockdown, when a livestreaming disco show went viral on March 31. This was when Pudong was already locked down for four days and shortly before the city launched its Phase-II lockdown in Puxi.

More than 5 million joined online disco dancing, and the comment section was filled with emojis of vegetables, a sign of what was on everyone's mind at the time – groceries.

"Put your cucumbers up!" "Here's my carrots!" Such comments never seen in live concerts filled the screen. The comments were most definitely not seen by the DJs, since it was a Chinese account specialized in rebroadcasting music festivals in Europe and America.

But comments and interactions do help performers, especially virtual live, according to Shanghai-based French DJ S.KIV.

"The comments really cheer me up," he told Shanghai Daily. "When I first started doing virtual live, it was a little embarrassing doing it all alone in my room, because usually I will be in a club with many people dancing to the music.

"When I started trying this one month into the lockdown, I was thinking once a week, then twice a week, and look at me now, I'm doing it six times a week."

The resident DJ at the Nest left Paris for Shanghai in 2014, shortly after he saw a program about Shanghai's night life on French TV. His plan was to get a look at the city's nightlife before going to Hong Kong for a year or two. Instead, he stayed on and has performed in many clubs in the city as resident or guest DJs, including UNICO, The Nest, The Cannery, the Cyclo, among others.

He was completely unprepared when the pandemic first hit in 2020, but decided to try virtual DJ this year.

"Some audiences asked if I would do something like this, and at first it was just an experiment, since I'm also out of job, and clubs are probably going to be the last to open," he said.

"Then you get cheered up by the feedback from the audience who have the exactly same lockdown experience as you do, who say you make us happy, or I love your music."

The DJ has also found his online audience a little older than his usual young club dancers, which encourages him to try more varieties of music genres, including some that the clubs usually don't encourage DJs to do.

"For that, I probably will continue with the virtual live, certainly with less frequency, even after everything opens," he concluded.