Everybody wants the concert movie

The video certainly didn’t kill the radio star. Taylor Swift, one of the biggest radio stars of the century Eleventh highest-grossing film in the United States in 2023 — the culturally monolithic Eras Tour’s own concert film. It seems that concert films, simulcasts, and even early live albums are becoming an increasingly powerful presence in the American media landscape, especially on the broadcast frontier. When considering these concert films, broadcasts and other live music media, it is clear that the benefits they offer broadcasters and audiences will not go away anytime soon. Actually, it makes sense that the radio star would become the video star.

While Taylor Swift’s “The Eras Tour” was the most popular concert recorded on video recently, hip hop has also had its share of filmed concerts in recent years. Amazon both released Kendrick Lamar’s “The Big Steppers Tour” concert film and streamed his recent Los Angeles concert “The Pop Out” live on both Prime Video and Twitch. Max is hosting an excellent concert film at SoFi Stadium for The Weeknd’s 2022 shows, and this December Netflix will debut a holiday variety show in which Sabrina Carpenter will perform cuts from her Christmas album, as well as other unspecified seasonal material. Streaming services seem to be particularly interested in live and recorded performances from star artists, and that makes perfect sense. While programs featuring such stars appeal to younger audiences, they often contain more adult content than broadcast networks can accommodate, thus allowing streaming services to position themselves as the less censored viewing channel of the future. Additionally, for live concerts, broadcasters do not have to pay for the physical concert and can market pre-sold intellectual property (public personas of artist personas) at the shows. The audience also wins, because it gives great pleasure to enter the concert world, even through the screen, and it is not as costly as going to a concert these days.

A closely related phenomenon is the emergence of the live album, whose main proponent in recent years has been Kanye West. Starting in 2016, live events showcasing his albums, called “listening parties”, became central to his vision. The most famous examples of this are his hybrid album premiere and fashion show at Madison Square Garden in 2016 and his unveiling of drafts of his album “Donda” in 2021, though he’s done this for several other albums as well. “In the Frost” listening parties were particularly successful in bringing interest and excitement to the album, and were a real spectacle, with moody, stadium-sized visuals that were true to the album’s intent. Staged for both live and streaming audiences, the possibilities of listening parties as a presentation of an album’s world and narrative remain open, but no other mainstream artist is as committed to the form as Kanye did with “Donda.” Billie Eilish hosted two listening parties for her newest album, and Drake, Beyoncé and Frank Ocean debuted their albums live in different ways — Drake used radio stations to debut “More Life” and “Her Loss”; Beyoncé introduced “Lemonade” through a radio channel. A stunning companion film from HBO and Frank Ocean that shows the makeshift “Infinity” during a livestream of him building a wooden staircase.

Are concert films and live album releases just the flavor of the times or a growing part of our media diet? While it’s impossible to say for sure, I think they’re both here to stay. Concert films and simulcasts will continue to be an easy sell for streaming services. When it comes to live album releases or listening parties, they exist secondary to the album they promote, so they are never the focus of the audience or the label. But they are still a tempting proposition and an effective promotional tool for an artist’s more ardent fans; so I believe these will continue and I hope that in the future artists will realize the untapped potential of the live listening party format. To me, the appeal of both forms is both simple and instinctive: they satisfy our innate desire to live, our social experiences, to be at the center of culture as we create it. And of course, watching them at home is much cheaper in terms of both time and money than trying to access these cultural resources in person.