Why David Byrne believes live music will benefit from streaming
The rise of streaming has entirely changed the landscape of the music industry. Listening to a new album no longer requires a trip to the record store and the dropping of a needle onto wax. It often doesn’t even require you to part with your money. All of the music you can conceive of is available at the click of a button on YouTube, Spotify or Apple Music, ready for you to shuffle, repeat or skip at will.
The effects of this change range from good to bad. It’s easier to discover new music than ever before, and artists no longer need to work with a label and a pressing plant to get their work to the masses. However, attention spans are dwindling, the art of the album is no longer necessary, and musicians are being paid far less than they deserve by streaming sites.
Debates surrounding the current landscape of streaming are constantly ongoing, but one area of the industry that is rarely considered in the same breath is the live world. Music venues and touring bands have a whole host of other issues to contend with, from closing DIY spaces to the cost of living crisis, but what if the rise of streaming could help the live circuit?
David Byrne once posited that it might. As the vocalist of Talking Heads, Byrne fronted one of the most iconic concert films of all time with Stop Making Sense, donning an oversized suit and swinging lamps around as he sang. Between this and his more recent ventures into Broadway with American Utopia, there are few people more qualified to comment on live performance than Byrne.
In his 2012 book How Music Works, the frontman suggested that the reduced interest in music as a physical product might prompt further interest in performance. If audiences no longer desire to own a record or a CD, might they desire a live show instead?
“As music becomes less of a thing,” Byrne wrote, “a cylinder, a cassette, a disc – and more ephemeral, perhaps we will begin to assign an increasing value to live performances again.” It’s a hopeful outlook – a suggestion that audiences might still be looking for a way to directly connect with the artists they listen to, to experience art beyond hitting play on Spotify, embracing that ephemerality for a night.
As venues continue to close and tours continue to make losses, it might seem that Byrne’s hope was misplaced. The prophecy hasn’t quite been fulfilled. The live industry seems just as uninhabitable as the streaming world, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that fans are uninterested in live performances. The huge recent successes of tours by Taylor Swift and Harry Styles show that that interest is still there, but smaller artists and organisations still struggle within that realm.
The effects of Covid-19 and our poor economic situation continue to plague live music, stunting the growth of underground scenes and the artists that exist within them. The knock-on effect of this stunts music more generally. If we hope to revive the live industry, to have more works of art like Stop Making Sense, to do as Byrne hoped and assign value to performances again, we have to push governments and larger venues to reinvest in those spaces.
Revisit David Byrne’s performance in Stop Making Sense below.
