Livestreaming music in the UK: quantitative analysis

As part of a larger project on livestreaming, we created a survey to investigate how musicians’ working lives have been impacted by COVID-19, and whether livestreaming has helped them. We also sought to discover musician and audience attitudes towards livestreaming, as well as the role that they think it will play in the future. Using exploratory factor analysis, we were able to identify several theoretical latent constructs in the data, which we converted to principal components to use in three multiple linear regression analyses. These allowed us to single out several variables that predicted the number of livestreams performed by musicians, and also the number watched/paid for by livestream viewers. A central theme that arose was the importance of communication during livestreams, both between audience and performer, and among audience members. Concerns about the lack of interaction and shared emotional experience appear to hold people back from watching. Opinion is mixed over whether livestreaming will provide musicians with a viable, additional income stream, but people agree that it has a role in the future for reaching new audiences, and also that it should embrace new possibilities made possible by the format rather than aim to replicate the physical concert experience.

The research was funded by ESRC as part of UK Research and Innovation’s rapid response to COVID-19 and carried out in partnership with the Incorporated Society of Musicians (ISM), the Musicians’ Union, the Music Venue Trust, Serious Ltd, the Cultural Centre of Value, and the Sheffield Performer and Audience Research Centre (SPARC).