How to do online concerts and all other artistic activities originally carried out offline, whether to charge or free, is essentially a methodological issue.
If you use the Internet to expand rapidly and stick to users, it must be free, so that as many users as possible can see and get used to this form, and encourage interaction and rewards. Because I want to be fast and broad, I only pinch the tip and don't spend much effort on cultivating small and medium-sized. Jay Chou is the pinnacle of Chinese pop music, and it is almost inevitable to use him for a free online concert.
On the night of "520", the edited version of "Magic Tianlun" was broadcast online, and it was free. People who only have memories of Jay Chou and don't care about Jay Chou will also click in and take a look. The barrage of greetings, to satisfy the wish to participate in a collective event, the number of viewers is of course huge. Watching a hard-to-park concert in Mercedes, and buying a sweet potato to eat after the show is a memory from a long time ago, and a scene that can only be reproduced in an unknown time.

Jay Chou Mo Tianlun's 2013 concert re-screening poster

But I didn't expect it to be recorded. If you don't pay, then watch the recording. It seems to be a business where both buyers and sellers do not lose money. Like other artists, specializing in online concerts and singing to empty venues is an unsustainable act of making money and shouting at a loss.
Jay Chou, who played the recording, knocked down the last threshold of the online concert. Although for the audience, there is not much difference between recording and live broadcasting on a small screen. But the very nature of the live art thing has changed. It is no longer a scarce resource, with the property of being fleeting and that moment never coming. It is equivalent to the announcement of the independent watchmaking group to change to automatic assembly line operation. Although the time of the watch may be more accurate, once it loses its unique properties, it must switch to another value system and follow another play method.

Live performance in 2013

In the field of culture and art, consumers need to be educated, and it is a continuous and large amount of education. Consumers are not called consumers, they are more like sponsors, who not only contribute money, but also participate in creation.
Internet industry default users do not need education. As long as you stick to them, let them get used to a rule, and are willing to burn capital money, they will have a chance to survive and grow, and one day they will be able to earn a "head dividend". The user is a human head, a hen laying eggs in a cage, and does not need any growth in thought, intellect and emotion, as long as it has spending power.
Taxi drivers have been educated by reality and understand what it means to "kill the chicken to get the egg". First give you the sweetness, so that you can't live without it, and then the sweetness becomes the platform service fee. After the short honeymoon period, the old drivers found that they had two bosses and had to pay double fees, and they could only laugh at their blind optimism at that time.
If the field of culture and art also follows this kind of thinking, only attracting and harvesting users, without spending time and capital to educate users, how will the industry pattern be reshaped? Getting users used to free live concerts, coupled with the existence of despicable events such as "Hamilton" pirated "live", distorts the profit model of all live arts. Production, channels, publicity, advertising, income distribution, etc. are all concentrated in the hands of the platform. The box office will no longer be the main source of income for live performances, and will lose its role in measuring the success of the performance.
So what? An industry, like a forest, depends on how complete and rich the biological chain is from soil microbes to top predators. The more species, the more complex and diverse the biological chain, the healthier. The same is true for the music and performance industries. Domestic capital focuses on short-term income, so the platform only focuses on leading artists to perform online concerts, and quickly builds a user base at the expense of free. Artists below the head are not favored by capital, and offline performances are increasingly rare due to the situation. Live Houses and theaters are sluggish, and artist incomes have plummeted. If the pop music industry still exists, life will only be harder for the people behind the scenes.
Over time, the lower part of the head may become necrotic due to blood loss. In this way, can the head still live alone? Even if the head is alive, it is just a lack of creativity and an old local to live, and you can't expect the next Leslie Cheung, Jay Chou or Cui Jian (there have been three of their online concerts recently).

An online re-screening, a nostalgia and carnival.

For users of free concerts, unplug the "user" label, we are fans first. People who love music, love to sing, and love all the elements that make up a concert (the people behind them are also), will go to a concert. Free is a bad habit, and it's killing the chicken and taking the egg for the industry. Free for a while, but are you really getting the happiness you want?
The intensity and persistence of happiness are related to the degree of engagement. Although it sounds like chicken soup, it's true. The live broadcast was halfheartedly running, and his attention was constantly distracted by the barrage and the things around him. Light investment - once the circular pattern of light and pleasure is developed, it will make our happiness, pain, and all experiences shallow. Live a shallow life, and don't become a brain in a vat in The Matrix in the end.
We are not old yet, but in the second half of our life, we can only find the warmth of singing a song together in the old songs of the last century. Isn’t it sad that there are no new songs and newcomers to immerse together?

"The most beautiful thing is not the rainy day, but your screams under the stage."