Why Live Music Matters: Implications from Streaming Music Festivals in the Chinese Indie Music Scene

Abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic, a new form of live music – streaming music festivals – has been popularised in China. With a particular reference to the Chinese indie music scene, this article critically examines the changes that streaming music festivals bring to audiences and music. Through a comparison to offline live music activities, this article examines the spatial change and its consequences for audiences, the shift of shared meaning within indie music communities, and the alteration in the value of music. This article argues, based on interviews and online ethnography, that by immersing themselves in live music, indie music lovers position themselves in multiple social relationships, seek shared meanings with peers, and construct the self through cultural participation; however, streaming music festivals cannot achieve similar effects as offline live music. The findings help us understand more about the digital trend of live music and allow us to reflect on what ‘live’ really means to the audience and the music.

Introduction

Musical activity and the development of media technology are inextricably associated. With the use of more media forms, music scenes are no longer confined to the local but have expanded to trans-local and digital spaces (Bennett and Peterson, 2004). As digital and internet technologies are now widely employed for music production and consumption, a growing body of literature recognises the online space as a significant realm of identity construction (Nag, 2018) and social networking (Hagen and Lüders, 2017) for music scene participants. Meanwhile, it has previously been observed that the transition to a digital music scene has also brought about significant shifts in various aspects of music culture, including practices, organisations, and interactions (Baym, 2007; Beer, 2008; Lingel and Naaman, 2012). But so far, not much attention has been paid to examining how the shift from offline to online affects audiences’ live music experiences and live music itself.

In late January 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic broke out in China. As part of the Chinese government’s response, entertainment venues were prohibited from opening to the public. In this context, streaming music festivals began to appear on a large scale. People used various phrases to refer to the music performances that are live-broadcast online, including ‘cloud’ and ‘online’ music festivals. In everyday practice, these terms are often used interchangeably. However, in terms of more rigorous terminological usage, none of these terms is accurate enough. The term ‘cloud’ usually implies remote storage or computing, while the meaning of ‘online’ is too broad and vague; neither of these two words can capture the connotations of the content analysed in this article. In comparison, the term ‘streaming’ is more appropriate to highlight the technological features of the instantaneous transmission and temporary possession of data from a remote server (Spilker and Colbjørnsen, 2020), which precisely reflects the nature of the digitally mediated music-performance content discussed in this article.

Live-broadcasting gigs and music festivals are not newly emerged in this period. Efforts have been made in music live-broadcasting since the age of radio and television (Frith, 2007), and digital technologies have provided additional opportunities to enable remote mediation of live music (Duffett, 2002, 2003). Previous attempts did not attract much public attention. However, the lockdown during the pandemic forced most, if not all, activities to move to the online environment, which provided an opportunity to examine large-scale digital-distant live music participation. The popularity of streaming music festivals in China is inseparable from the media that affords them, namely danmaku-enabled live-streaming platforms. First released by the Japanese video platform Niconico, danmaku (Dàn mù, 弹幕 in Chinese / danmaku, 弾幕 in Japanese) is a subtitling system that enables viewers to post comments on a video timeline and have those comments overlayed on the video (Nakajima, 2019). The technological-interactive features of online video platforms have become somewhat of a trend, making communication and interaction an integral part of many people’s watching experiences of mediated videos. Audiences have been found to have different motivations for using danmaku, including obtaining information, entertainment, and social interaction (Chen et al., 2015, 2017). It has been suggested that danmaku is used to resist social pressure, norms, and control (Chen, 2018) and facilitate democratic participation and discussion (Yin and Fung, 2017). So far, however, little attention has been paid to the cultural impact of this interactive video mediation.

According to the prism proposed by Nancy Baym (2015) for analysing media, danmaku videos present four distinctive characteristics. First, interactivity is placed at the forefront by both platforms and users. In danmaku video platforms, danmaku is integrated into the video; in other words, interaction becomes part of the video content. This feature positively enhances video audiences’ perceived interactivity and distinguishes it from the traditional commenting system (Chen et al., 2015; Liu et al., 2016). Second, from the perspective of temporal structure, danmaku videos create synchronicity asynchronously. Danmaku comments are displayed on the timestamp of the video on which users commented, making them closely related to current video content, thus giving a sense of real-time liveness to viewers. Nonetheless, because comments are posted at different actual times, ‘[s]uch a temporal feeling of virtual liveness [. . .] is highly unstable, because the pseudo-simultaneity in virtual time is often experienced in stark contrast to the nonsimultaneity in actual time, especially the time lapse between the production and the reception of a comment feed’ (Li, 2017: 248). Live-streaming reduces such instability, but it is still not comparable to face-to-face synchronous communication.

Third, although it could be replicated, such as through screenshots, danmaku gives rise to instantaneous communication. Whereas traditional commenting systems always show posted comments under the video, danmaku comments are only displayed at specific timestamps unless a user replays the video. The ephemeral messages imitated face-to-face conversation and created a dialogical atmosphere. The last distinct feature of danmaku is that comments are not posted to particular users but to imagined audiences. Comments on the traditional commenting system may also be posted to unspecified users, but the commenting and subsequent replying practices are under specific usernames. Danmaku comments, in contrast, are anonymous, and it is uncertain who would read them. Under the collapsed context, the conceptualisation of imagined audiences could influence social media users’ practices and social media use (Litt, 2012; Marwick and boyd, 2010).

This study examines changes that streaming music festivals have brought to audiences and live music mediation. In the meantime, this article also compares and analyses music lovers’ in-person live music practices to identify the differences between in-person and digital-mediated live music experiences in order to better understand the meaning and value of live music. Here, ‘music lover’ refers to a distinct group of audience members who are core audiences for indie music but distinguished from fans by focusing more on the music than the musicians. Data for this study were collected through online ethnography and semi-structured interviews with 31 Chinese indie music lovers who actively participated in the Beijing indie music scene. In the pages that follow, it will attempt to point out some of the shifts and trends in live music in the streaming environment, including (1) the removal of the spatial properties of live music, which creates certain challenges for social relationship embedment for audiences, (2) the difficulty of building emotional resonance within music-lover communities, and (3) the gradual productisation of live music.

Theoretical Framework

Sociology of Flow and Aesthetic Reflexivity

From a sociological perspective, the transformation of live music from an offline activity to an online event indicates a series of changes in flows. In their seminal work, Economies of Signs and Space, Lash and Urry (1994) examined the phenomenon of accelerated flows in the context of post-industrialisation and globalisation, particularly from economic and cultural perspectives. In their analysis, flows in postmodern societies are embedded in accelerated mobility and are reflected in various forms, including capital, labour, commodities, information and images. In general, flows are divided into two types: mobile objects and mobile subjects, which correspond to live music and audiences in this study.

Lash and Urry propose that the increasing significance and pervasiveness of symbols in contemporary society has accelerated the mobility of object flows. Thus, in their analysis, flows of symbols embodied in symbolic commodities are most emphasised; and within the symbolic commodities, they call particular attention to aesthetic contents and features. As the aesthetic dimension of symbols is progressively valued, commodities undergo two changes. Firstly, the ‘aestheticisation of material objects takes place in the production, the circulation or the consumption of such goods’ (Lash and Urry, 1994: 4). The connection between material goods and aesthetics is gradually strengthening. Secondly, and more significantly, aesthetic symbols become critical industrial products. Dematerialisation promotes the mobility of object flows. In this process, time and space are the two core concepts that help to dissect flows. Based on Anthony Giddens’ (1984, 1990) argument of time-space distanciation, Lash and Urry (1994: 14) argue that time and space have been emptied out and have become ‘increasingly abstract time and abstract space’. In a globalised and post-industrial context, the abstraction of time and space is necessary for market extension. However, meanwhile, it also abstracts the objects circulating in the flow of the market.

In the case of live music, attending a gig in person is about watching and listening to the content of the performance. While it can be said that live music performance is an intangible commodity, the sequence of experiences brought by attending such events is also a crucial part of live music consumption (Wynn, 2015). With digital and internet technologies, streaming media has dramatically reduced the importance of temporal and spatial elements of live music. Accordingly, streaming live music has become an abstracted content product. Other elements that originally accompanied musical content, such as atmosphere, ritualised experiences, and non-mediated interactions with other audiences and musicians, have been stripped away.

In the meantime, the speed and scope of the subject flows have also been unprecedentedly boosted. Subjects are ‘increasingly emptied out, flat, deficient in affect’ in rapid and long-distant travels (Lash and Urry, 1994: 15). As the other side of the coin and a response to the high mobility of objects and subjects, the subject – individuals – has gradually acquired the attribute of reflexivity. Different from Beck’s (1992) and Giddens’ (1984, 1990, 1991) concepts of reflexivity, Lash and Urry (Lash, 1993, 1994; Lash and Urry, 1994) highlight the aesthetic dimension of reflexivity. For them, aesthetic elements play an essential role in the postmodern reflexivity that permeates people’s daily lives. People reflexively use ‘aesthetic expert systems’, manifested in ‘film, quality television, poetry, travel and painting as mediators’ (Lash and Urry, 1994: 54), to regulate everyday life. In this process, the aesthetic ‘allegory’ and ‘symbol’ become moral sources of the contemporary self.

Concerning community, Lash (1994) critiques the traditional frameworks of subculture and offers a point of view worthy of discussion. In the tradition of sociologically informed cultural studies, rituals and resistance through rituals have been recognised by scholars (e.g. Hall and Jefferson, 1976) as the core of subculture and thus positioning the focus of studies into subcultural groups and communities. Nonetheless, a much-debated question is whether subcultural groups can be empirically proved as coherent as the subculture concept implies. Thus, for example, Andy Bennett (1999) proposes the idea of ‘neo-tribes’ to examine a looser set of cultural identifications in youth music culture, which can also be seen as a revision and development of the original subculture theory. Lash (1994) further argues that the concept of ritual in subcultural theory is essentially made up of scattered signifiers, while the basis of a subcultural community should be the shared signified, in other words, a shared meaning among community members. From Lash’s point of view, one of the essential prerequisites for constructing a community is sharing meanings among all members. Therefore, to grasp the nature of indie music communities, it is crucial to scrutinise shared meanings and the process of establishing them.

Lash and Urry’s work has captured contemporary society’s economic and cultural characteristics, providing valuable viewpoints to examine the objects and subjects within and beyond cultural consumption. Although their arguments were presented three decades ago, a suggestion and premise of this article is that new forms of flow in the current digital society are still consistent with their contentions: time and space are more abstract; flows of objects and subjects are more increased; and aesthetics and symbols are more dispersed and more significant in an internetworked world. Applying the framework of the sociology of flow and aesthetic reflexivity in this study would be not only appropriate but also necessary.

Music in Action

Sociological research on music continues to flourish in both theoretical and empirical development. In general, two lines of thought have dominated research in this field. On the one hand, a great deal of previous sociological research on music has focused on examining the relationship between music, or musical culture, and social structures, and how the two interact. The widespread adoption of Pierre Bourdieu’s (1983, 1984, 1993) theories in music sociology and the prevalence of subcultural studies (e.g. Hall and Jefferson, 1976; Hebdige, 1979; Muggleton, 2000; Thornton, 1996) are representative of this line of thought.

On the other hand, another way of thinking is to consider music as a resource for social action and a medium for social practice, also known as the music-in-action approach. Scholars such as Tia DeNora (2000, 2003b, 2006, 2011) and Antoine Hennion (2001, 2007, 2012) take this approach to investigate the power of music in shaping self, emotion and social interaction in everyday life, as well as how music enters the action and social life. In DeNora’s (2000:24) words, this approach ‘conceptualize[s] musical forms as devices for the organization of experience, as referents for action, feeling and knowledge formulation’. As this article is carried out from the perspective of audiences of live music, music-in-action, a micro-approach that places music and musical practices within the actions of social actors, fits better than structural approaches to music. Through this music-in-action lens, music is interpreted as ‘a technology of self’ (DeNora, 2000: 46) and ‘a constitutive ingredient of social life’ (DeNora, 2003a: 151). By considering music as an activity rather than a thing, the approach of music-in-action helps us understand how live music is integrated into music lovers’ practices, thereby discussing the relationship between live music and bodily actions. As Christopher Small (1998: 2) argues, ‘[m]usic is not a thing at all but an activity, something that people do’. Taking music into practice highlights the power of music in shaping embodied actions and thus enables the perception of the body in and through music.

By comparing music lovers’ experiences between physical live music and digitally mediated music performance, this article attempts to refine and develop the music-in-action approach by proposing a reverse perspective on the role of embodied actions in perceiving and shaping music. Through interpersonal interactions and bodily activities, live music is translated into embodied actions for indie music lovers, which in turn constructs a distinctive understanding of live music for them. The sociology of flow and aesthetic reflexivity dissect how music and the body are gradually de-materialised and abstracted in the digital age, while the music-in-action approach helps us to reconstruct the meaning of the body in musical practices.

Method

The study was conducted through a series of anonymous, semi-structured interviews with Chinese indie music lovers in Beijing and online ethnography within Chinese internet networks. This study is a part of a larger study about online music socialising practices of Chinese indie music lovers. Nevertheless, as the COVID-19 pandemic broke out during the study, the form of online interviews through the online voice-calling service provided by WeChat substituted for the original face-to-face interviews. At the same time, due to the emergence and popularity of streaming music festivals, new themes related to streaming music festivals were added to previous interview themes. As a result, the data collection for this study was divided into two stages.

The first stage included 13 face-to-face semi-structured interviews from September 2019 to January 2020. The interviewees all shared the following characteristics: (1) they have been engaged in the indie music scene for more than six months, (2) they participate in online and offline indie music activities actively, (3) they are indie music amateurs rather than practitioners in the music industry, and (4) they live in Beijing. Participants were recruited from various Chinese social media platforms, including Sina Weibo, Douban, and WeChat. The author searched keywords of recent indie gigs held in Beijing and randomly selected social media users who had posted related messages or pictures of the gig. Interviewee recruitment messages were sent to these users through the private messaging function of Sina Weibo and Douban, indicating the purpose of the research and the criteria of expected interviewees and asking them whether they would like to participate in a face-to-face interview if they assume they meet the requirements. Similar messages were posted in a variety of indie music WeChat groups. The author confirmed whether they met the interviewee selection criteria through later communication.

In the second stage, data were collected through online interviews with 18 respondents from February to May 2020. Because offline gigs were prohibited, the previous interviewee recruitment method of searching for recent gigs on social media and selecting users from search results was no longer feasible. Therefore, recruiting respondents from indie music WeChat groups became the primary method, but the same interviewee selection criteria were applied. In total (including both the first and second stages), the interviews were conducted with 31 respondents; 17 were female and 14 were male, with a mean age of 23 years. All interviewees had obtained or were studying for a university degree, presenting a somewhat higher educational background of indie music lovers compared to the general population in China (or at least in Beijing).

Before representing and discussing research findings, it is necessary to explain further about the participants in this research – indie music lovers. In the literature on music sociology, cultural studies, and popular music studies, many scholars use the general term ‘music fans’ to refer to people who are interested in music (e.g. Bennett and Peterson, 2004; Hesmondhalgh, 2013; Nowak, 2016). However, in the context of Chinese, especially for those who are in the indie music scene, the word ‘fans’ (Fěn sī, 粉丝 in Chinese) usually equals to ‘idolater’, which is commonly associated with the East Asian idol culture and industry (see Zhang and Negus, 2020). The majority of participants agreed with the statement that fans pay more attention to idols than their musical works, whereas music lovers (in the context of the indie music scene) care more about music. Whilst it is a general statement of the research participants, such an argument is not supported by any existing empirical research. Considering the research context, avoiding confusion on the semantic level and respecting the interviewees’ wishes, this study will use the term ‘indie music lover’ to refer to the participants in this study.

The data collection and analysis were conducted in line with the abductive research strategy (Blaikie, 2010; Timmermans and Tavory, 2012). An abductive data analysis follows a three-stage procedure: first, discovering participants’ concepts, meanings, motives, and interpretations from their own language; second, generating sociological concepts from the first-stage analysis and developing sociological understandings; and last, refining understandings by inputting the researcher’s point of view. The following sections will also follow the constructionism epistemology of abductive analysis, combining participants’ descriptions and the researcher’s interpretations, presenting the analysis results and discussions concurrently. The results and discussion sections focus on three key themes: beginning by dealing with the transformation of spatial attributes between in-person and digital live music, then examining the collapse of shared meaning in streaming music festivals the article then turns to an evaluation of live music in the process of digital productisation.

Results and Discussion

Blurring Boundaries of Social Relations

In modern society, the binding of social relations and geographical place has been broken, but space is still often used as a benchmark for people to differentiate their social relations. And for many of the research participants, live music venues are exactly one of the spatial benchmarks. Most study participants suggested that indie music lovers compose a rather minority group in society because of the relative niche status of indie music in the overall music market in China. In the Chinese music scene and market context, rock music (including its various subgenres) is one of the largest indie music subcategories; thus, its popularity can be somewhat representative of indie music in China. According to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI, 2019), rock music only ranks seventh in the list of music genres favoured by Chinese audiences. For that reason, indie music lovers in China rarely encounter people with similar musical tastes to them in their daily lives. As a result, a common view amongst interviewees was that there was a clear boundary between their everyday lives and the indie music experience. This boundary is not invisible but often manifests through the physical spatial separation of live music venues.

Live music venues, represented by livehouses and music festival sites, support various forms of live music activities, but what is more noteworthy in this study is that indie music lovers see them as a separate space detached from daily life. This detachment is reflected in two facets. First, for indie music lovers, entering a live music venue implies a switchover of the modality of self-presentation. As Liza (female, 23) put it: ‘When I go out [to livehouses], I am in this way. When I come back, I return to a “normal” student again.’ Second, these music venues are used to distinguish the social relationships of a music lover. One participant commented:

There are some friendships that have developed, but mostly musical. Next time I go to a music festival, I will definitely ask him if he will go, and then I will think [. . . But] they are just some ad hoc friendships, just like ‘Christmas limited [goods]’. It is a feeling like they will appear in a certain period, your relationship will not be very strange. At that time, it feels like you are friends until death. (Harry, male, 20)

This excerpt suggests that, for some Chinese indie music lovers, some friendships arise from live music and exist only in live music settings. This is not to say that such friendships are short-lived, but that they are connected by intermittent live music experiences. As a result, there is a separation between the so-called musical friends and other friends for many participants, as another interviewee, Kyle (female, 24), illustrated:

You will make a distinction in your heart. These people are my music-lover friends, the friends I met in music. And others are friends in my life. They may have helped me at work or are very close to me in daily life, but they belong to different circles. There is a significant, obvious boundary. I can’t tell whether such a boundary is good or bad, it distinguishes anyway.

In addition, due to the corresponding relationship between live music and music venues, music venues are given special spatial and social meanings by indie music lovers. Such a spatial separation, to some extent, leads to a detachment of indie music lovers’ musical lives from their ‘daily lives’. For them, musical life is not included in daily life but runs parallel to it. The space of live music venues has therefore been given social meanings. Certainly, this is not to say that there is no music in everyday lives of indie music lovers, but that they distinguish musical activities, especially live music activities, from other parts of life.

If we say that the live music setting is detached from the daily space, then streaming music festivals integrate the musical and daily space through digital technologies. As a result, the spatial integration leads to several co-presence management difficulties for indie music lovers when watching streaming music festivals. The most direct manifestation is a distraction. As Ian (male, 21) put it:

When I watched the streaming live, I didn’t just watch but [simultaneously] usually do something else [. . .] There was always something [to do]. You occasionally glanced at the screen and felt like ‘oh, I like this one’. But a short while later, you suddenly got busy with other things.

Similarly, in all cases, the interviewees reported that they had never watched a streaming musical festival attentively, like watching a gig in a livehouse. Such a distraction can partly be explained by the context collapse when music lovers watch streaming music festivals on their digital devices. The term ‘context collapse’ (boyd, 2011; Davis and Jurgenson, 2014; Marwick and boyd, 2010) has been used to refer to the phenomenon whereby boundaries between an individual’s different identities as well as their related social networks are being blurred in specific social media because of an assemblage of various categories of audiences. Here, in this study, this concept can be applied to a different context and used in a different way – it happens not only within social media but also beyond the digital environment. The spatial property of live music has been stripped in the process of remote streaming. Accordingly, the boundary between musical and daily life is broken. For example, the interviewee Kyle stated:

When I watched it, because I was at home, my mother said: ‘what are you watching?’ Because they still hold prejudice against rock music. In order to avoid troubles, I just turned it off.

Because many music lovers participate in offline live music to get rid of trivial daily life, losing the property of physical places is losing opportunities to shift to another identity and social relationship. The digital infrastructure and live-streaming technology facilitate music transmission; however, music is not merely acoustic information. More important is the experience that derives from live music, or the ‘vibe’ in interviewees’ words, which is closely bound with physical places. Although the streaming music festival successfully brings live music into music lovers’ daily lives, it fails to pull them away from it. As a result, the boundary between daily life and musical experience is blurred.

Frith (2007:8) observes, ‘the value of music is encapsulated in its live performance’, and the role of musical media is to ‘make the live concert work in the home’. An extension of Frith’s assertion is that because live music matters, the place that affords live music also matters. Unfortunately, streaming music festivals are unable to transmit venues to their audiences; instead, they convey music to another site without spatial settings. Consequently, this makes it harder for music lovers to locate themselves. They are neither in the daily trivial nor in the musical setting.

Collapsing Shared Meanings

The theme of shared emotions recurred throughout the interviews when asked about interviewees’ views on the sense of community and collectivity in general live music experiences. In previous studies on music sociology, scholars have suggested that emotion is one of the sources of the power of music (DeNora, 2000, 2006). Some interviewees suggested that the emotional resonance between audiences was considered a prerequisite for a sense of community. For example, Kay (female, 19) said:

We may have the same feeling when listening to this song. I think it is a kind of inner feeling [. . .] If you have a sense of belonging, you must have resonance, you must have something in common.

Kay put three concepts – belonging, resonance, and common – together to explain each other, which helps us to understand how the shared emotion, or ‘inner feeling’ in Kay’s words, among music lovers contributes to the formation of music communities. Nevertheless, as the excerpt also illustrates, shared emotion is rooted in the subjective perception of music. In other words, it is possible to interpret that indie music lovers think they share similar emotions with others, which may be a feeling, an imagined experience, instead of a fact. If this feeling of commonality exists only in the minds of individuals, how does it convert into the shared meaning of a community? The conclusion that can be drawn from the interviews is that in the offline live music settings, indie music lovers express and mediate their emotions through collective activities, by which the inner, imagined ‘shared emotions’ are transformed into mutual, recognisable shared actions.

For indie music lovers, the participation in live music primarily consists of various forms of collective physical activities among audiences, such as headbanging (shaking head to the rhythm of music), circle pits (running and jumping in a circular motion, pushing and bumping into each other), and pogo (jumping up and down while remaining in the spot); and sometimes between audiences and band members, in the form of crowd surfing, for example. Participants suggested that these collective activities are significant sources for perceiving interpersonal connections at live music scenes. As Jane (female, 19) put it:

Interacting with everyone and with the band, such as pogoing together or catching these diving people together, I feel we can generate a connection [. . .] Everyone has some eye contact and physical communication. We don’t need spoken language, but create a sense of belonging.

As seen in the excerpt, through physical collective activities, audiences at the live music scene gain a connection that makes people perceive the community. More significantly, in their accounts of the events surrounding live music, collective activities are considered part of the meaning of live music itself and are one of the key differences between live music and mediated music listening experiences. When asked about his experience of offline live music, Ian (male, 21), a frequent indie-rock concertgoer, cited a counterexample to illustrate the importance of collective activities in live indie music. In December 2019, Ian attended a joint concert of the bands Penicillin and Sunset Rollercoaster at Beijing Worker’s Stadium. Unlike the layout of livehouses, the stadium provided fixed seats for audiences. Because of this change, the audience experience was completely different. Ian commented:

In the Worker’s Stadium [. . .] you had to sit on the chair and were not allowed to jump [pogo]. Then you felt pretty upset. You couldn’t feel that way. I think the most striking difference is that live music can bring you a kind of feeling that you cannot get through records, through listening to music [. . .] They [sitting on chairs in live music and listening to records] make no difference for me [. . .] It is not just about standing up, but the atmosphere behind it.

Here, for Ian, a crucial constituent of live indie music is participating in the music beyond merely listening. This participation, embodied by collective bodily activities, has become part of the meaning of live indie music. Thus, the stripping away of participation obviously hampered Ian’s experience at this performance.

However, if we now turn to the streaming music festival, streaming technologies have significantly changed the way audiences engage with music. In the virtual space, written communication through danmaku comments substitutes physical collective activities and becomes the primary, if not the only, form of interaction between audiences. In addition, another essential change is the composition of the audience. During the COVID-19 lockdown in China, offline entertainment venues were not allowed to be open to the public; thus, online entertainment became the only means of amusement for most people. Besides, due to the popularity of the online show The Big Band in 2019, indie music has gained more extensive attention from the public. As a result, the number of non-music lovers in the audience has expanded tremendously in streaming music festivals. Together, these two factors hindered the achievement of shared meaning in streaming music festivals.

The threshold for accessing live indie music has been lowered through streaming technologies, providing more chances for non-indie music lovers to learn about indie music. Recent studies have suggested that many audiences who have never engaged in the indie music scene begin to watch streaming indie music festivals; however, scholars doubt that the newcomers are only attracted by indie music as a fashion of the moment and not as ‘authentic’ as ‘real’ indie music lovers (Gu et al., 2021). Participants in this study did not indicate indie music lovers’ attitudes toward ‘newcomers’, but, from their perspective, too much ‘noise’ from outsiders caused negative experiences, especially compared to offline settings where audiences tend to be more homogenous. One interviewee commented on interactions through danmaku: ‘most people just send something messy, something nonsense, some memes, flying around the screen. It is meaningless.’ (Nora, female, 20) A possible interpretation of this excerpt might be that indie music lovers disagree with the contents of danmaku comments posted by non-music lovers. In offline settings, although there are also a certain number of non-music lovers among the live music audiences, the audience group is dominated by indie music lovers. As a result, the composition of offline live indie music audiences shows a relatively homogenous nature that is easier to form and convey emotional resonance. In streaming music festivals, however, the audience is no longer dominated by indie music lovers. It is difficult for the heterogeneous audience group to reach a consensus on the connotation of the music and its expression, and thus it fails to achieve resonance.

Another reported problem was that brief text exchanges are no substitute for the emotional resonance achieved by physical co-presence and shared movement. Under such circumstances, the necessity of the existence of danmaku has even been questioned by many interviewed indie music lovers. It was suggested that audience interactions are essential; however, written communication is sometimes unnecessary and unwelcome. As Kyle illustrated:

I forget which song that I watched, I just curled my lip and felt like, no wonder in the [offline] music festival, sometimes, people [band members] up there [at the stage] speak loudly to people [audiences] down here that do not talk. The danmaku is such the essence of Bilibili because we can output, that is, we can communicate, can do a lot of good things. But for music, live music, it requires people to be settled in an emotional resonance that doesn’t need a lot of words.

Indie music lovers may expect interactions between audiences during live performances; nonetheless, written communication cannot meet such a requirement. Many recent studies (e.g. Chen et al., 2017; Liu et al., 2016) have suggested that obtaining social connectedness is one of the motivations for users to watch danmaku videos, but the present results in the context of streaming music festivals exemplify an ambivalence towards connectedness and interactions. The connectedness is derived from danmaku interactions, but excessive danmaku comments and different opinions have reduced the sense of connectedness and collectiveness.

The shared meanings in offline settings are connected to a vague and implicit experience of the atmosphere; in comparison, streaming music festivals require explicit expression of the meaning, which is more likely to be controversial. It can thus be suggested that collective activities are used as the greatest common divisor of shared meanings in offline settings. Audiences may perceive different individualised meanings of music and the scene, but collective activities diminish differences while seeking common points between audiences of different properties. On the contrary, the written communication through danmaku aggravated dissimilarities in the context of streaming music festivals. Hence, many indie music lovers choose to turn off the danmaku function when watching streaming music festivals. For example, Mike (male, 20) said:

A lot of danmaku comments are mannerless. They not only spam other bands or musicians’ names [when others are playing], but also, some people, diss the vocal of the band who are singing, like out of tune or not good at singing. Too many things like this. So, I basically turn off the danmaku function in the later part of the streaming music festival.

The controversies in danmaku comments make it difficult to provide a unanimous perception of the atmosphere for live music audiences. These findings raise intriguing questions regarding the nature of collectivity in streaming live music. With a small sample size, caution must be applied in interpreting these findings. It is difficult to argue that no community has been formed among the audiences of streaming music festivals. However, from the participants’ point of view, the shared meanings among indie music lovers have indeed experienced a collapse in the online environment compared to offline settings, which may adversely affect the formation and maintenance of the live music community.

Devaluating Music in Live Experience

So far, this article has demonstrated the transition of audiences’ experiences between offline and streaming live music. The following section will discuss the transition of indie music’s role in streaming music festivals. During online ethnography, what stands out in the danmaku-enabled streaming music festival is that the importance of danmaku interaction is somewhat higher than the music itself for many audiences, especially non-music lovers. This finding is consistent with that of Seio Nakajima (2019: 109), who found that danmaku users seemed ‘to foreground the importance of forms as the purpose of interaction and communication was the continuation and proliferation of communication itself’. Because this study’s interviewee population is restricted to indie music lovers, it is difficult to examine how other audiences evaluate danmaku and music. However, a festive atmosphere in danmaku comments is easily observed during the online ethnography. This positive atmosphere differs from indie music lovers’ negative opinions toward danmaku comments in streaming music festivals illustrated in the previous section. A possible explanation for this inconsistency might be that non-music lovers and indie music lovers have different attitudes and purposes toward watching streaming indie music festivals. For non-music lovers, participating in something entertaining during the COVID-19 lockdown period seems to be more prioritised than appreciating music.

Previous studies have indicated that pursuing social connections in physical solitude situations is one of the most significant motives for engaging in mediated co-viewing practices (Cohen and Lancaster, 2014; Pittman and Tefertiller, 2015). Danmaku makes a further step of co-viewing by integrating audience participation and watching, enabling a sense of connectedness and belonging (Chen et al., 2015, 2017). It is possible to hypothesise that danmaku participation gradually evolved into a media ritual ‘through which we imagine ourselves to be connected to the social world’ (Couldry, 2003: 2). In this process and through the function design, danmaku has been given meaning (Li, 2017; Yang, 2020). A noteworthy trend in the study is that danmaku may attract users’ attention in the streaming environment, while the video content – live music – itself tends to take second place. Lee (male, 26) gave an explanation of his danmaku practices:

If you watch [streaming music festivals] you will turn on the danmaku, right? The danmaku will distract me, distract me from watching the live music, the performance of music, the performance of the band [. . .] But it depends on situations, sometimes I will [turn on the danmaku] [. . .] for example, if I’m interested more in the interactive things, something entertaining, I will turn on it. If I watch a gig in particular, I won’t turn it on because I think it would be distracting.

Lee’s explanation of his danmaku practices illustrates the connection between users’ attitudes toward video content and the use of the danmaku function. When the purpose of watching a video is more related to the video content, people are more likely to turn off the danmaku function to avoid distraction from overlaid comments. In comparison, when people watch videos mainly for entertainment, video content is merely a source of entertainment, and opening the danmaku function may further enhance the experience. However, the audience’s focus is inevitably scattered or even shifted in doing this. Based on the focus shift, one can expect that music’s value may be diminished in streaming music festivals when mass audiences pay more attention to danmaku comments. Neil (male, 19) commented: ‘in fact, people just treat this [streaming music festival] like TV [shows], not like in the livehouse where people focus on this thing. It can be music; it can also be comedy shows.’

In previous studies on live music’s cultural value, becoming immersed in live music has been recognised as a cross-group and cross-genre value that audiences attach to concert-attending practices (Behr et al., 2016). The underlying rationale for this attached cultural value of live music is that ‘music is not a thing at all but an activity, something that people do’ (Small, 1998: 2). Although it is undeniable that watching streaming music festivals while turning on the danmaku function is a musical activity, a trend identified in this study is that the value of the ‘activity’ is being amplified in digital media, while the importance of music is diminishing. This shows a possible shift in the digitisation of live music, which is becoming progressively more product-oriented and, at the same time, less culturally valuable to its audiences.

In his analysis of the socio-cultural value of recorded music, Lee Marshall (2019) argues that recorded music has been broadly recognised as an object, and the cultural value of recorded music is closely tied to the social functions of records, primarily as cultural symbols, rather than embedded in the music itself. This concept of ‘music as an object’ led to the economic collapse of recorded music in the Peer-to-Peer (P2P) era to a certain extent. As symbols, the music industry produces and sells records as cultural products; music consumers buy records as cultural artefacts. The meaning of music is gradually lost in the process of productisation and symbolisation. As a cultural product, recorded music can easily be replaced by other forms of cultural products as long as other symbols represent similar meanings. In comparison, live music, particularly live indie music, is seen as a cultural experience that enables people to participate in a specific culture, which is more difficult to substitute. Based on danmaku, the format of streaming music festivals emphasises participation but at the same time gradually transforms live music into a cultural symbol. This makes us cultural sociologists worry whether live music will lose the unique cultural and social meanings it carries in the process of symbolisation.

Conclusion

By comparing indie music lovers’ experiences in offline live music and streaming music festivals, this study analyses the impacts of the live-streaming of live music, especially with the support of the danmaku function, on indie music lovers and the live music itself. Among these impacts, ‘flow’ is a keyword, which is gradually reshaping live music and live music experiences in the digital environment. In streaming music festivals, the flow of musical space is deepened more than ever, leading to the challenge of re-embedding social relations. The digital-enabled accelerated mobility of the subjects – audiences – deconstructs the shared meanings that were originally used to build community, resulting in a breakdown of implicit emotional resonance. And the mobility of the object – live music – deepens the productisation and symbolisation of live music, showing the potential to cause a reduction in its cultural attributes. Taken together, these results suggest a subtle shift in the concept of live music within the process of digitalisation and streaming.

In streaming music festivals, we watch the performance together across different spaces. This remote, distanced, and simulated live experience emphasises freedom from space constraints and takes time as the basis for constructing the concept of live. However, for music lovers, the hardcore group of live music audiences, the stripping away of space creates a troubling live experience. Here, the findings of this article are not simply underscoring the importance of space for live music, but rather illustrating the value of the body in constructing live music. It is now well established from a variety of studies that the body is considered as a vehicle for cultural experiences (e.g. Benzecry, 2011). And this article argues that the body is not just a vehicle for cultural experiences; it shapes cultural experiences and, likewise, defines the culture itself. In the case of live music, ‘live’ is not just about watching a performance in real-time; ‘live’ itself also encompasses and builds on the tangible experience and participation of the audience. Without the embedment of social networks and the constitution of community that comes with the body and action, the meaning of live music cannot be fully conveyed and expressed. In this way, this study turns the vision of ‘music-in-action’, by which body and agency are constructed and mediated through music (DeNora, 1999, 2000, 2003b), to ‘action-in-music’. The failed experiences of indie music lovers in streaming music festivals discussed here allow us to highlight the importance of the body and embodied actions in cultural experience and to explore how live music as a culture is constituted by the body. The accelerated flow of space and the body dramatically illustrates how live music is essentially embodied.

Using Lash and Urry’s sociology of flow as a tool and lens and linking DeNora’s ‘music-in-action’ with the case study of streaming music festivals, this article goes beyond the specificity of this particular case of digitalised and distanced live experience and explores more generally the ways in which people use and enable live music as a cultural practice. Through cultural participation, people position themselves in multiple social relationships, seek shared meanings with peers, and construct themselves. Unfortunately, the form of streaming music festivals has not been able to meet their needs. It may be for these reasons that when the COVID-19 pandemic was effectively controlled and offline music venues reopened in mid-2020 in China, streaming music festivals disappeared quietly.

On the negative impact of streaming music festivals on indie music, this study is not arguing that cultural-product consumption is not a form of culture or criticising the value of the cultural industry. The productisation process of music and development in the music industry have significantly contributed to new forms of fandom culture, particularly within the mainstream pop scene (Fung, 2009, 2013; Zhang and Negus, 2020). Nevertheless, the invasion of fandom culture from mainstream pop to the indie music field diminished the ‘authenticity’ of indie music culture for indie music lovers. As Hibbett (2005: 58) indicates, indie music gives way to ‘something both trendy and exclusive’, claiming ‘for itself a kind of vacuous existence, independent of the economic and political forces, as well as the value systems and aesthetic criteria, of large-scale production’. Thus, indie music could be seen as a genre that is independent of or opposite to mainstream popular music and mainstream popular music consumption. Like high art, the value of indie music depends on its lack of popularity and requires the specialised cultural capital of audiences (Hibbett, 2005). People get a more convenient way to access indie music through streaming and other technologies, which facilitates the popularity of indie music. However, the (over-)popularity through, and result in, streaming music festivals may shake the structural foundation of indie music. To a certain extent, the productisation of live indie music may not only bring about the devaluation of live music but also lead to the depreciation of the indie connotation.

A note here is that these findings must be interpreted with caution as the participants in this study are a specific group of indie music lovers who are the hardcore members of the scene but not the broadest audience for streaming music festivals. Therefore, the findings reached from their point of view cannot and should not be taken as full proof of streaming music festivals or digitally mediated live music; instead, they should be seen as a trend in the shift of live music from the offline to the digital world.

The scope of this study was limited in terms of the participant population of indie music lovers and lacked data on the views of non-music lovers of streaming music festivals. Hence, these findings may be somewhat limited in fully understanding streaming music festivals and their effects. By comparing the differences between online and offline live indie music, this research expects to better understand the meaning and value of live music. However, it must be admitted that, at the economic level, streaming music festivals have helped the Chinese indie music industry to survive the difficulties during the COVID-19 pandemic (Gu et al., 2021). It also plays a significant role in spreading indie music at the cultural level.

When the first draft of this article was about to be completed in June 2021, Sony Music announced the establishment of Sony Immersive Music Studios, committed to developing ‘immersive music experiences through the power of creativity and technology’ (Sony Music, 2021). With the continuous employment of up-to-date technologies, it is reasonable to expect a different online live music experience in the future. A final point to note in particular is that how people experience leisure and recreation during the pandemic is arguably different and distinct from our ‘normal’ experience. Two years after the pandemic outbreak, although it still looms over the world, the shadow of lockdown seems to be fading, and the music performance market is gradually getting back on track worldwide. With this in mind, streaming music festivals, while still in existence, are no longer the only option for music lovers to watch gigs. Will the perception of streaming music festivals change as they become a complement to attending offline live music? Further work is needed to fully understand the implications of the mediation of live music in different socio-digital environments.