Building performance capital during hard lockdown: Insights from the ESNS 2021 virtual-only showcase festival
Introduction
The live music business has been among the industries most affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. Although many initiatives have been taken to mitigate the pandemic's negative impact on live music performance, and its impact on the entire cultural industries sector, there is no doubt that, in addition to the measurable financial losses, the situation posed serious health challenges for everyone, and has had lingering, long-term social impacts (Carr 2020, 2022; Flynn & Anderson, 2022; World Economic Forum, 2020; Florida & Seman, 2020). Numerous tours and festivals have had to be postponed or canceled, which has led organizers, artists, and other representatives of the live music business to seek alternatives to what was traditionally understood as a live performance (Frenneaux & Bennett 2021; Mouillot, 2022). While livestreaming of musical performances has been developing for some time (Thomas, 2020), its prevalence has increased significantly during the COVID-19 pandemic, which raises questions about the future of this sector's development, its impact on the music industry, and on the relationships between artists and fans. One of the events that decided to experiment with a virtual-only format was the showcase festival Eurosonic Noorderslag (ESNS). It has been held in Groningen, the Netherlands in January each year since 1986 (Ahlers, 2021). Its last pre-pandemic edition took place on 15–18 January 2020, hosting 347 acts and 42,061 total visitors, of which 4323 were conference visitors (ESNS, n.d.). Confronted with increasing infection rates in fall 2020, festival organizers decided to move the 2021 edition to the Internet. Consequently, it included all the elements of a regular showcase festival (Ahlers, 2021; Galuszka, 2022): a digital music industry conference, networking sessions for artists and music business professionals, and a music festival—yet all of them were held entirely online. The music festival element, which is the main interest of this paper, consisted of numerous prerecorded videos (each about 15 min long) that showcased artists performing “live”. The unique pandemic circumstances, which forced participating musicians to experiment with a new format, allowed us to observe how various emerging artists utilized their performance capital and media affordances (Gibson, 1977; Hutchby, 2001; Ellison & Vitak, 2015) created by the festival organizers to develop their careers in the difficult realities of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Referring to the conceptual grid created by Pierre Bourdieu (1984), (1993), (2005), we wish to analyze this situation in the context of performance capital (Gruzd & Hodson, 2021; Miller, 2017; Bush, 2016; Davies & Seymour, 2010, Ford & Brown, 2006), building on the distinction between offline and online forms of this capital as proposed by Gruzd & Hodson (2021). It is assumed that online environments, the development of which is paradoxically fostered by the COVID-19 pandemic, facilitate mobilizing and converting Bourdieu's alternative capitals (Scott, 2012). This translates into a re-evaluation in the field of performance capital and necessitates re-thinking the strategy of building it. Of particular interest is the process by which emerging artists build performance capital while they are still finding their footing in the industry and gaining recognition through live performances. Many artists do so by taking part in showcase festivals (Ahlers, 2021; Everts et al., 2022).
The fact that the festival films had to be shot in a short period of time, and during hard lockdowns in most cases, makes the videos made for ESNS 2021 a particularly interesting means of studying how online performance capital is utilized in practice. To confirm observations in the scholarship that the online performance capital is a concept scarcely described in academic literature (Gruzd & Hodson, 2021), it should be added that the YouTube platform is the most common point of reference in such discussions. YouTube is one of the main models of participating in online music within the participatory culture (Burgess & Green, 2009; Jenkins, 2006; Jenkins et al, 2013; Kim, 2012; Trainer, 2015), and has established fanbase relations in the form of parasocial interactions (Rasmussen, 2018; Rihl & Wegener, 2019). When it comes to artists performing at showcase festivals, Everts et al. (2022, n.p.) argued that targeting the message to industry representatives is equally important as “playing at a prestigious showcase festival signals to the industry that your band is promising and is worthy to invest in”. For this reason, the audience of ESNS 2021 films differs from YouTube's, and the online platform created by the organizers of this festival displays unique affordances. Yet discussions of the topic from this approach remain absent in academic literature on the online performance capital. Therefore, an analysis of the distinct aspects of this phenomenon might enable scholars to identify the different strategies that emerging musicians use to build online performance capital. This is especially relevant for such artists in the age of COVID-19, when they are not able to play conventional live concerts in front of an audience, and thus have to select other, digital means to reach their fans (Frenneaux & Bennett 2021; Kjus et al., 2022; Mouillot, 2022).
Taking this into account, the purpose of this paper is to discover what approaches were adopted by artists to make the festival videos and what these approaches tell us about the online performance capital possessed by artists.
Section snippets
Explaining showcase festivals and portal shows
To understand why ESNS decided to organize a digital-only edition of the event instead of simply canceling it as many other festivals did, it is necessary to highlight the specificity of a showcase festival. A showcase festival is “an event whose main goals are the promotion of emerging artists and the networking of musicians and music industry representatives. Therefore, apart from several short performances held in multiple venues, such events usually host conference and networking sessions
Data and methods
The present research is of an exploratory character as the studied phenomenon, despite bearing several similarities to older visual forms like music video or concert footage, is a novel phenomenon that emerged in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. (Thomas, 2020)
The empirical material consisted of two parts: 16 in-depth semi-structured interviews and two e-mail interviews with artists who performed at ESNS 2021, and content analysis of all the 181 videos that were presented during the
Overcoming pandemic challenges: “Make the best you can under current circumstances”
When applying to perform at ESNS 2021, artists did not know the festival would take a digital-only form. Those who were accepted learned about the event's format in late fall. While respondents claimed that this decision was a disappointment, it was to a large extent anticipated, as COVID-19 infections were increasing in the whole of Europe. Decisions to participate in the digital-only edition were motivated in most cases by the absence of alternatives: while playing at the virtual ESNS was
Discussion and limitations
While online performance opportunities for musicians have been developing over the years, interest in such forms has increased significantly since the pandemic. The modality is particularly important from the perspective of emerging artists who do not have large financial resources and contacts to organize face-to-face live shows in pandemic circumstances. Online performances allow creators to build new forms of relationships with audience members by transforming their own bedrooms or
Conclusion
Analysis of the videos made for ESNS 2021 is particularly interesting as artists who took part in the festival had no role models and had to experiment with various video formats. On top of this, the production of videos in most cases took place during hard lockdowns, which made it challenging both from an organizational and health point of view. In such circumstances, artists’ abilities to manage crisis situations is as important as their creativity. Artists better equipped with these skills
Acknowledgments
This paper was written when Patryk Galuszka was visiting scholar at the University of Groningen (funded by NAWA Bekker Program) and Leuphana University Lüneburg (funded by Alexander von Humboldt Foundation). Patryk Galuszka would like to thank Prof. Kristin McGee and Prof. Michael Ahlers.
Blanka Brzozowska is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Economics and Sociology at the University of Lodz. Her research interests include digital media and urban cultural studies. Her current research projects concentrate on crowdfunding, creativity, and embodied design. She has published in such journals as Creativity Studies, Media, Culture & Society, International Journal of Communication, International Journal of Cultural Studies, and Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies. She
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Cited by (2)
Blanka Brzozowska is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Economics and Sociology at the University of Lodz. Her research interests include digital media and urban cultural studies. Her current research projects concentrate on crowdfunding, creativity, and embodied design. She has published in such journals as Creativity Studies, Media, Culture & Society, International Journal of Communication, International Journal of Cultural Studies, and Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies. She has published three books, including Crowdfunding and Independence in Film and Music (Routledge 2021).
Patryk Galuszka is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Economics and Sociology at the University of Lodz. He conducts research on music industries and the influence of new communication technologies on artists’ careers. His recent work concentrates on crowdfunding, music streaming, and internationalization of the Polish recording industry. He has published in such journals as Media, Culture & Society, International Journal of Communication, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Popular Music & Society, Popular Music, and Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies. His most recent works are edited volumes: Made in Poland: Studies in Popular Music (Routledge, 2020), Eastern European Music Industries and Policies after the Fall of Communism: From State Control to Free Market (Routledge 2021) and a monograph Crowdfunding and Independence in Film and Music (Routledge 2021).