You can learn a lot from Companies House, the online register of British firms. For instance, that George Michael’s private company, now owned by his estate, goes by the comical name of Nobby’s Hobbies Holdings Ltd. And also that Nobby’s Hobbies Holdings Ltd has just filed documents announcing plans to broaden activity “in the next one to three years to include live public performances”.
But wait: live performances from a singer who died in 2016? What can it mean? Speculation points to a possible hologram comeback, inspired by Abba’s triumphant move into the virtual realm with their Abba Voyage show. Like the latter’s “Abbatars”, the scheme has a nifty coinage: “HoloWham”. And Andrew Ridgeley, whose original role in Wham! was about as substantial as a hologram, is on board with the idea. Perhaps he and George will be able to share a stage again.
Of course, it won’t be the real George Michael. Death, alas, has robbed us of that. But if the star makes a posthumous return in digital form — his estate has neither confirmed nor denied the speculation — it will underline the high-tech illusionism that saturates pop stagecraft these days. Not just gigs with virtual stars, but gigs featuring flesh-and-blood ones too, and audiences filming the action on phones to watch back at a later date. Working out what exactly is “live” about live music isn’t straightforward.
That observation is less true of grassroots venues with their meat-and-potatoes sound systems, where there can be no mistaking the source of the voices and instruments blaring from the speakers. They face a precarious future. According to the charity Music Venue Trust, almost one in every six small venues in the UK closed or ceased scheduling music in 2023. Spiralling costs and noise complaints were among the reasons.
It’s the opposite situation at the other end of the scale. While small venues are shuttering, the biggest ones are booming. Last year London’s O2 Arena sold 2.5mn tickets, the most annually since opening in 2007. Meanwhile, the highest-grossing tour ever, Taylor Swift’s $1bn-earning Eras tour, filled stadiums across the Americas, and will do so again this year in Asia and Europe. The launch of Beyoncé’s Renaissance tour in Sweden in May attracted so many visitors that it was blamed for causing an uptick in the country’s inflation rate.
The live circuit’s arenas and stadiums, its enormodomes, are flourishing. I am a habitué of them, particularly the O2 Arena. As the FT’s pop critic, I have been going to the Greenwich behemoth since its opening. Back when my musical diet consisted of grumbling indie and alternative rock bands, I would have abhorred spaces such as these. “Arena rock” was a pejorative in the 1980s and 1990s, an emblem of that fuzzy concept, “selling out”. But whatever taint was attached to arenas in the past by pious indie fans — guilty as charged — that is now gone.
Gigs in these places can be spectacular. Sound quality is clearer and crisper, productions are more imaginative and mobile. Being with tens of thousands of others adds to the sense of occasion. A show by electronic duo The Chemical Brothers last year made knockout use of the O2 Arena’s scale. The peaks and drops in the music were made to seem all the more vertiginous, while the excitement they provoked was all the greater.
Mark Murphy worked on the O2 Arena when it was built. Founder of audiovisual and acoustic design company Experience Studios, he has also worked on Wembley Stadium and the London Olympic Stadium. “The O2 was really a landmark in London for that scale of live music venues,” he says. “To have a venue custom-built with the appropriate acoustic treatment and design, it set a benchmark.”
Big gigs face the challenge of thuddy, muffled acoustics. “Sound travels really slowly,” Murphy says, with a rueful laugh. The first stadium rock concert was The Beatles at Shea Stadium in New York in 1965, a baseball and American football ground where the sound system was overwhelmed by screaming fans. Arenas often have other lives as the home of ice hockey or basketball teams. But over the past 20 years an increasing number have been built primarily for staging music.
Better audio systems are also helping to resolve the challenge of filling a large space with intelligible sound. Increasingly, modern loudspeakers are omnidirectional, emitting soundwaves in all directions rather than just forwards. “What we talk about now is spatial sound,” Murphy explains. “We talk about the idea of envelopment and how to bring that to scale.”
Not everything I’ve seen at the O2 Arena has been a slick technological marvel. When Whitney Houston played there in 2010, her once magnificent voice ravaged by drug addiction, the singer’s embarrassment at her repeated failure to reach the big note in “I Will Always Love You” was shown in close-up by the live video feed on the big screens flanking the stage. On that occasion, technology magnified her all-too-human frailty.
Usually, however, productions are smoothly high-tech affairs. Large LED screens show pinpoint-sharp films. Brightly lit stages jut into the audience like colourful runways or rise up as islands at the back of the auditorium. The musicians are often supplemented in the sound mix by backing tracks and beats. The same can be true of the singing too.
Justin Bieber faced accusations of miming when I saw him play in the O2 Arena in 2016: he had a lackadaisical habit of lowering the microphone from time to time while his soft voice rang out. But artifice is common even for singers who very clearly are singing live. Vocals might be blended with pre-recorded parts. The live vocal can be fed in real time through voice processing software so as to smooth out faults, the singing equivalent of Botox. Sounds from instruments are also digitally manipulated.
Is this cheating? Murphy reckons not.
“I think one of the things that has significantly increased is the expectation of a show to be holistic,” he says. “There are lights, videos, pyrotechnics and kinetics. The production is tied into a process that synchronises all of the videos, lights, sound et cetera. The musicians have to be incredibly good because they’re stepping in time with the technology driving this experience. If anything, I would argue it’s increasing the quality of musicianship, doing a two-hour show that is time-coded through all of the technology designed to create ‘wow’ moments and an incredibly immersive environment.”
“Immersion” and “experience” are buzzwords in live music. Declan Sharkey uses them often while talking about the UK’s newest and biggest indoor arena, the Co-op Live, which opens in Manchester in April. Sharkey is the lead architect on the project. He works at Populous, a specialist firm in stadium, arena and convention centre construction.
The Co-op Live will have a capacity of 23,500, compared with the O2 Arena’s 20,000. It arrives amid an arena-building boom. In contrast to the disappearing grassroots venues, enormodomes are popping up like huge mushrooms around the UK and beyond. Sharkey is also working on venues in Cardiff, Munich and Cork. “There’s definitely been a big shift towards the delivery of arenas as artists do a lot more touring,” he says.
Despite the struggles faced by small venues, the live music market is actually growing. Goldman Sachs predicts a global rise in value from $28.1bn in 2023 to $39.5bn in 2030. Rising ticket prices means that more money is being spent on gigs. According to the analytics company Luminate, concertgoers in the US spent 40 per cent more in May 2023 than they did the previous September. More is expected from shows in return.
The Co-op Live has been designed primarily for music. “We’ve been able to bring the fans approximately 12 metres closer to the stage compared to a comparable capacity venue that is more multifunctional,” Sharkey explains. It will have a standing capacity of 9,000, more than other UK arenas. There will be no ribbon board displays around the sides, a common feature of sports venues. “It’s really about focusing on that kind of immersive experience for both fan and artist,” Sharkey says. “You have to deliver the best possible experience for each ticket price.”
Just two miles away is Manchester’s other arena, the 21,000-capacity AO Arena. It has responded to the construction of its rival with a £50mn upgrade. Competition is hotting up at the top end of the market. The Co-op Live has artist areas where the star attraction can bring in personal chefs and furniture. Its loading bays have space for eight articulated lorries. It’s customary for touring acts to travel with their own sound system, which is then connected to the infrastructure in venues.
According to Murphy, whose acoustics firm Experience Studios is a subsidiary company of Populous, there is a debate taking place on the arena circuit about whether venues should provide all the sound equipment. But he believes that the likeliest developments will focus on the sound mix rather than the speaker systems. One possibility is for gig-goers to be given their own in-ear monitors, like those worn by performers, with the music channelled through their mobile phones.
“Where I see more progression is in the software and the processing, to create clarity and spacialisation in the mix,” Murphy says. “Probably also the capacity to mix venue sound with in-ear sound.”
Concert sound increasingly resembles the highly engineered and edited world of recorded music. It represents a convergence between the two branches of music-making, live performance and studio recordings.
These two branches grew apart in the 1950s. Before then, recordings were made by singers and musicians playing together in studios: a record was the document of a live event. The adoption of magnetic tape in studios changed that. It allowed recordings to be chopped up and reassembled. Multitrack consoles made it possible to create elaborately layered songs that could never be performed live, at least not accurately: The Beatles’ psychedelic masterpiece “A Day in the Life”, for example.
Technology is allowing music at gigs to match the sonic sophistication of its recorded counterpart. But the live market’s unlevel playing field also mirrors the lopsided economics of recorded music. In streaming, a few top names command the lion’s share of income. Similarly, the biggest gigs are taking a growing share of ticket revenue. According to research by music economist Will Page, stadiums and festivals took about half of the box office spend in 2022 compared with 23 per cent in 2012.
“Some of these huge-scale concerts, the ticket prices are eye-watering,” says Sybil Bell, founder of Independent Venue Week. “The money you spend on one ticket for one show could see you go to a gig every week in an independent venue throughout the year.”
Bell was previously owner of Moles, a small venue in Bath, in the west of England, that hosted bands such as Radiohead and Oasis when they were on the way up. It closed in December. She founded Independent Venue Week in 2013 to highlight the value of independently owned places like Moles. A week-long celebration in the UK and the US, this year’s programme of events has just ended.
“When you’re looking at where the spend is going, as consumers right now we have less money to spend so we’ll be more cautious about where we’re going to spend it,” she says. “But it’s a much more complex picture than saying the big venues are taking away from the small venues. I don’t believe that’s solely the answer. These two can exist in the same space.”
Smaller venues nurture the talent that ends up in the bigger venues. “Artists that are coming through these venues, they rely on these independent spaces to be able to take risks, to learn their craft, to get it wrong, make mistakes,” Bell says. Unlike holograms, real singers need time to grow.
The gaudy desert citadel of Las Vegas is a warning sign about where a tech-driven, top-dollar-oriented live market might lead. Much of today’s culture of immersive experiences has been road-tested in the self-styled “entertainment capital of the world”. Yet for all its lavish musical history, the city isn’t known for breaking new acts. It relies on established names.
In September, U2 opened the Sphere there, the most technologically advanced arena to date. (It was designed by Populous.) The Irish band’s ongoing residency illustrates Las Vegas’s blend of innovation and conservatism. The Sphere is encased by a shell of LED screens and has a preposterous number of speakers, more than 168,000 in total. Yet the bleeding-edge venue relies on a heritage act.
Adele’s forthcoming shows in Munich illustrate the reach of Sin City’s influence. Due to take place in August, they will transpose her Las Vegas residency show to a pop-up stadium holding 80,000. A pop-up stadium! Is this the future for live music: oases of palatial plenty amid a desert of defunct small venues?
If so, it’s a depressing prospect — but I suspect it will not stop the conveyor belt of new stars. Over the past decade, there has been a tilt away from rock towards pop and rap. Rock has a history of bands gigging their way up from the bottom, whereas pop and rap are more studio-centred. Breakthrough success for the next generation of singers and rappers is liable to come from streaming hits or social media, not the long slog from the back room of The Dog & Duck to the distant summit of the O2 Arena.
The power of live music was on display at the Grammy awards in Los Angeles last weekend. Two performances stood out. The first was Tracy Chapman making a rare public appearance to perform “Fast Car” with her acoustic guitar. The other was Joni Mitchell singing “Both Sides Now”, sitting in a chair with a stick, back on stage after her brain aneurysm in 2015. Camera cutaways at the televised ceremony showed celebrities transformed into awestruck fans. At one point Taylor Swift was shown singing along heartily to “Fast Car”.
These are the “I was there” moments that concerts have always strived to achieve. That is what the high-tech stagecraft of an arena or stadium show is designed to create. The combination of screened visuals, live musicianship, pre-recorded music, lights and stage action is deployed to maximise the feeling of being present at something special.
Would it be too highfalutin to label this synthesis, when it works, as an example of Gesamtkunstwerk, or “total artwork”? Anke Finger, professor of German studies and media studies at the University of Connecticut and a specialist on the concept, thinks not.
The term Gesamtkunstwerk refers to an artwork that unites different forms of art. Coined in the early 19th century, its most prominent advocate was Richard Wagner, who located the concept in opera’s blend of drama, music, words, singing and dance. “It is an aesthetic ambition to borderlessness,” Finger explains. “And second, a political blending of art and life. And third, there’s a metaphysical element, an aspiration to the spiritual.”
The Wagnerian association has given the concept a totalitarian taint due to the composer’s adoption as a cultural totem by the Nazis. But Finger prefers to emphasise the communal aspect of the total artwork, an act of bringing people as well as art forms together. Total artwork historians look back as far as ancient Greek theatre and the birth of democracy to find examples.
“I think today’s pop concert, especially the stadium pop concert, is the ultimate expression of the total artwork,” Finger says. “But there’s one condition. It depends on the emotional experience connecting the audience so as to create a community. Because the community aspect is really important.”
Money and marketing are the motors of big pop shows. But the transformative potential of the communal impulse remains alive within them, according to Finger. “For me the social connection literally becomes seismic,” she says. Last year one of Swift’s stadium gigs caused a tremor in Seattle measuring 2.3 on the Richter scale due to the combined noise and movement of the show and the spectators. “Wow, she really did it!” Finger marvelled to herself at the time.
Of course, big pop shows can be awful. The sound can be muddy and the size overwhelming, with small dots on a distant stage making an ill-defined noise. Overpriced drinks and queueing can make you feel like an easily fleeced sheep. Buying tickets can be exorbitant and stressful. But for all these drawbacks, there’s nothing like a big pop production when it hits the mark.
At its heart is the age-old practice of a person playing an instrument or singing. But the technological engineering gives the staging a cybernetic character, like a complex communications system. Its dynamics combine the real and the artificial, the human and the mechanical, the live and the not-live. It creates a kind of virtual reality. No other form can match it. The best big pop concerts are out on their own, at the vanguard of a new era for live entertainment.
Ludovic Hunter-Tilney is the FT’s pop critic
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