Are Virtual Concerts Worth It?

The COVID-19 pandemic pushed the music industry to experiment seriously with virtual concerts.

Historically, musicians and their managers have been careful about challenging the traditional concert model that became their main source of income as revenue from album sales disappeared.

Is the current surge of virtual concerts here to stay or will it be abandoned as soon as large in-person gatherings are permitted again and the novelty of concerts in Fortnite wears off?

For the middle tier of recording artists, virtual concerts are shaping up to be a worthwhile part of their business portfolio, generating healthy income and engaging a geographically dispersed base of core fans. For the top tier of artists — those who perform in stadiums and arenas — the opportunity cost of virtual concerts doesn’t make financial sense to do very often once in-person concerts return. That said, a couple of such performances each year can unlock a lot of the untapped potential revenue from fans who can’t attend their normal concerts.

Virtual concerts are having their moment

There’s no opportunity cost to trying a virtual concert during a pandemic. Artists aren’t performing, touring, shooting videos, or even doing in-person sessions with songwriters. With everyone stuck at home, fans will forgive a disappointing attempt at performing online and artists have time to experiment. Live Nation, the dominant concert promotion and venue management company, has even converted its site to curating a schedule of virtual performances.

Virtual concerts have been growing in three formats: video streaming platforms, within the virtual worlds of video games, and virtual reality.

Isolation frustration must have hit the roof, then, when musicians saw the success of Travis Scott’s first Fortnite concert on 23rd April where some 12.3m fans attended, comfortably beating Marshmello’s previous Fortnite record of 10.7m attendees in February 2019.

Not only was this the first of Scott’s five Astronomical concerts in Fortnite, with a total attendance of 27.7m people, Scott also stood a very good chance of making serious money from the event, thanks in a large part to the sale of associated virtual items, while ‘The Scotts’, a new track by

Travis Scott and Kid Cudi that was debuted on Fortnite hit 7.45m plays within its first 24 hours on Spotify. Travis Scott is, of course, far from the first artist to stage a concert within a game: as mentioned above, Marshmello beat him to Fortnite, while the likes of American Football (Minecraft) and Soccer Mommy (Club Penguin) have taken their live shows to online games.

Musicians have also explored different ways to use online games to interact with their fans, from playing them at FIFA (Boy Pablo) to having their own Fortnite island (Weezer). At the start of May, the indie band Black Country, New Road — about as far removed from Travis Scott, both stylistically and commercially, as you could get — released their own Sims characters.

But the success of Scott’s Fortnite takeover stands as a stark reminder — especially for artists struggling to lure in 50 people to a live Instagram stream — of how difficult the crossover between gaming and music can be.

With all this in mind, Music Ally considers why Travis Scott succeeded so spectacularly in Fortnite while other artists struggled with their live streams.

1) Travis Scott had both timing and execution on his side

There’s no point denying that Travis Scott got lucky with the timing of Astronomical, which came as live shows were canceled around the world and billions of people in quarantine were looking for new experiences to keep them amused.

But that should take nothing away from what was a jaw-dropping event, one that media analyst Matthew Ball compared to “a fully designed, immersive experience” rather than a concert. “The stage disappeared right away, with players taken to brand new places, with different special effects (e.g. altered gravity). It was a guided experience/story, like a concert, but far more was possible as it wasn’t ‘real’,” he explained.

Fortnite has been responsible for impressive events before — both musical (Marshmello’s 2019 gig) and otherwise, such as the game’s famed Season 10 finale, which blew up the virtual world and sent players into a black hole.

Travis Scott’s gig, however, was another level for entertainment, with underwater scenes, rollercoasters et al, leaving journalists grasping for words to describe what had happened. “Astronomical is a curious mix of an event, art installation, music video, and a video game,” Patricia Hernandez wrote on gaming website Polygon, “the beginning of a totally new type of media experience that will likely continue to change as the years go by.”

2) Astronomical had the promise of new music

For all that Astronomical was far from your standard-issue gig or music industry promotion, it did pull one of the oldest tricks in the music business book: drawing in an audience with the promise of new music.

Fortnite creator Epic Games went big on the lure of a “brand new track” as it announced Astronomical on 20th April; then on 23rd April, the day before Astronomical kicked off, Scott continued the tease by revealing the cover art of the song on Instagram. The song itself, ‘The Scotts’, was played at the climax of the Astronomical gig, debuting in front of 12.3m people, who then sent it racing up the charts.

‘The Scotts’ would have done very well without Astronomical and Astronomical would have been massive without ‘The Scotts’; but having a new song as part of the initiative helped to build anticipation for the event among fans and — especially — among old-school media, who probably understood the idea of a song premiere more than that of a Fortnite gig.

3) Fortnite wasn’t just a big platform — it was the right platform

Fortnite is massive, with 350m registered players (not all of them, of course, active players) in total as of May 2020. That is up from 250m in March 2020. Fortnite added that 3.2bn hours of play happened within the game this April. While Astronomical wasn’t the first gig on Fortnite, it was one of the first — making it new enough to be the kind of novelty that drives headlines.

But a big platform doesn’t guarantee a big audience, as anyone who has seen a Facebook Live disappear into the ether can confirm. One of the key features of Astronomical’s success was that there is a significant crossover between Travis Scott fans and Fortnite users.

Mark Mulligan from Midia Research recently claimed that Travis Scott fans are 2.3 times more likely to play Fortnite than general consumers. Scott is also a Fortnite player: in 2018 he famously joined up with Drake and Tyler “Ninja” Blevins to play Fortnite on Twitch, making global headlines.

Another important point about Fortnite is that the platform is already experimenting with its positioning and role, using more traditional media to help it become something beyond just a “simple” video game.

In December 2019, for example, Fortnite premiered a scene from Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker at the game’s Risky Reels drive-in theatre. Fortnite has also started running Quibi shows, while the announcement post Astronomical of a Party Royale social mode within Fortnite, which includes a concert venue, alongside virtual restaurants, a football pitch, and a nightclub (see box), shows how important expanding into new activities is to Fortnite.

The reason for this expansion, according to Daniel Kruchkow, CMO of Crush Music (which manages artists including Weezer, Train, Fall Out Boy, and Sia), is that games like Fortnite need to keep growing in the face of strong competition.

“You look at all these games as services: there are several, they all have massive daily audiences and you start to think about what is next for these because everyone wants to keep growing and growing — otherwise you get passed,” he says. “So you see Fortnite doing a Star Wars movie trailer premiere, with JJ Abrams and the Millennium Falcon flying by, it is some really incredible stuff that they have done over the past year way outside the game realm.” (See the full interview with Kruchkow in this issue.)

What this suggests is that Fortnite, faced with competition from the likes of Warzone and Valorant, might need music as much as music needs Fortnite.