Let's not be like the Roaring 1920s jazz babies who practiced collective amnesia about the 1918 flu epidemic at the end of World War I. The 2020 Covid pandemic had real-word effects on the deliverability of physical music, the ability to host live concerts, and the loyalty of fans to Zoom, ConcertWindow, Kickstarter and Patreon environments - and some effects are still with us today!
Covid-19 hit touring musicians with a speed that startled everyone.
Tours were moving into high gear again in February 2020, just as initial
reports of lockdowns in Wuhan were expanding into stories of cruise ships being
quarantined. There was a general feeling that the spread of the virus might get
serious by late spring. Suddenly, the NBA and NCAA basketball seasons were
being cancelled, a local production of “Hair” in Colorado Springs halted all
performances, and by the middle of March, many urban areas in the U.S. were on
lockdown. Wire’s tour of the U.S. and Torres’ tour of Europe were cancelled so
quickly, the bands were stuck in mid-tour as international flights were halted,
leaving few options for bands to get home.
Because the Zoom
video-conferencing app had been gaining popularity prior to lockdown, it did
not take musicians long to realize that they could sponsor home-based informal
concerts that fans often pay for. But during the early weeks, revenue streams
were not a high priority. In one of the first “festival” uses of Zoom, dozens
of musicians gathered remotely to honor John Prine, who died of Covid
complications early in the pandemic. The two-day Zoomfest was one of the first
such events to brighten the homebound. Soon, musicians from Ben Gibbard to
Jonatha Brooke were planning regular series of concerts Zoomed from home. (While
NPR has collected its “Tiny Desk Concert At Home” series for an interested
audience, it seems we are only in the first stage of the pandemic-era Zoom
concerts being compiled together, both by artists and in a multi-artist
“festival” format.)
Supplies of physical products
were reliant during early lockdown days on Amazon and independent mail-order
outlets. Among the artists whose releases were planned near Zero Day were
Waxahatchee, Pearl Jam, The Weeknd, The 1975, and The Strokes. In some states,
some music releases might be offered at large general-purpose stores like
Target. But in those states with the most severe restrictions, a customer could
only go into Target or Walmart to get groceries, and other parts of the store
were literally walled off in access. Here in Colorado, we had a mixed bag. One could buy music releases in Denver and Colorado Springs big-box stores, but not in Summit County, where the Target no pasaran bars looked like police tape. Here, the lockdown was brief
enough so that by the time mid-May releases from Perfume Genius and Nap Eyes
hit the streets, record stores already were open again. But in New York and
other dense urban areas, strict lockdowns lasted well into late summer.
Because it is impossible to
gauge the reality of a counter-factual, we can only guess which trends were
initiated and which were aggravated by the pandemic. In the realm of the
decline of physical products, it seems safe to say that the slowdown preceded
the lockdown by several quarters. Rappers Kanye West and Chance the Rapper
already announced late in the decade that they would stop releasing physical
products. The wholesale shipping and distribution tightening of late 2019 and
the Apollo Masters lacquer plant fire of February 2020 both preceded the March
lockdown. But the utter collapse of supply chains in multiple manufacturing
realms that hit in mid-2020 made a bad situation for LP and CD delivery far
worse.
The edgiest element of
pandemic performance was the occasional live protest song emerging from the BLM
actions in the summer of 2020. A few such songs became local anthems, though
few were recorded until John Craigie’s Greatest Hits….Just
Kidding, Live, No Hits included ‘Summer of 2020’ when it was
released in late 2024.
In remote live performances,
musicians had made a few faltering steps in the latter half of the 2010s to
offer customers in remote areas “live online” concerts that many would pay for,
but the enforced work-at-home regimes and the lack of touring possibilities
drove Zoom and its smaller competitors like ConcertWindow into the stratosphere
in 2020-21. In the late summer of 2020, innovators were trying new options for
truly live concerts, such as live house concerts and pod-based remote live
concerts in stadiums, but successive waves of Delta and Omicron variants of
Covid killed the bulk of live performances well into 2022. Musicians relied
more on direct-support sites like Patreon – bands sought investment for
specific albums via Kickstarter as early as 2010, but the pandemic necessitated
the deeper fan involvement made possible through Patreon.
When an independent regional musician focused solely on the home market, the limits of logistical realities helped drive a house-concert business that proved a booming new venue option long after Covid restrictions ended. This was particularly true for summer months stretching into the fall of 2020. Since attendees at outdoor house concerts could practice social distancing, local heroes here in Colorado, like Jeremy Facknitz and Edie Carey, could conduct live performances in the worst months of lockdown. What was less successful was the attempt to preserve a festival environment through the use of “pod clusters” of people within large outdoor venues like sports stadiums – it was too difficult! And the minor successes reached in the fall of 2020 made some bands too optimistic about rebooting national tours. Several hit the road in the winter and spring of 2020-21 only to find themselves stymied by resurgent Delta and Omicron waves of Covid.
What surprised many, though
it may have reflected the fact that bands had little else to do, was the pace
of new music in 2020-22, which kept rolling along through lockdown, inflation,
and the dissolution of supply chains. Even newcomers were given proper due
without benefit of support tours – Olivia Rodrigo, Wet Leg, The Linda Lindas,
Pom Pom Squad, Illuminati Hotties, and dozens of other groups and soloists
gained a following based solely on studio recordings. Behind all the releases
was the unspoken desire, however, that musicians and fans wanted to get back to
live music as quickly as possible. Fans
were desperate for novelty and levity, as Wet Leg’s instant hit “Chaise Longue”
proved.
What the pandemic no doubt slowed
was the rise of a truly global music business. The U.S. and EU (including the
post-Brexit UK) formed its own cloister. China trade wars during the Trump
administration, and China’s severe nationwide lockdown later in the pandemic,
prevented China from jumping onto the K-Pop and J-Pop bandwagons. (This was reinforced
by Xi’s insistence that China’s pop bands avoid Western cultural
contamination.) The wall in Asia was replicated in central Europe after Russia
invaded Ukraine in February 2022 – not just because cultural contacts between
Russia and the West fell to insignificance, but because Putin, to gain more
cultural support for the war, hewed more closely to the Russian Orthodox Church
view that Russia must go it alone in the arts, because all Western arts were
suspect and corrupt.
Musicians could scarcely
depend on a music industry that would come roaring back in all aspects, though.
Bandcamp, the former “gold standard” for online musician support, was acquired
by Epic Games in early 2022. In September 2023, Epic laid off 16 percent of the
Bandcamp staff before selling Bandcamp to Songtradr. For the time being, fans
could purchase LPs and CDs, as well as download music, through the Bandcamp
site, but no one felt too optimistic about how long this would last.
Still, this was all
trepidation about possible worries to come. As the pandemic began to lift in
the third quarter of 2022, all the fans could think about was getting back to
the arenas and clubs. And the big money to be made occasionally trickled down
to musicians, at least for the first few post-pandemic quarters.
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