How do music festivals adapt to a pandemic? They Fest in Place, of course

Ben Gibbard, I salute you for doing an at-home live-streamed concert every week from March through May as we all adjusted to the quarantimes.

Like so many current realities, no one could've seen "musicians as the new Twitch stars" coming back in January. Yet in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, the music industry relied heavily on livestreams-typically just one artist in a room with webcam doing an acoustic performance.

In our ever-connected present day, it was the adjustment of least resistance. At first, there was some novelty to seeing artists like Death Cab for Cutie's Ben Gibbard interacting with fans in the chat and taking an occasional request. But this summer, longtime New York Times music critic Jon Pareles succinctly summed up the audience experience for this impromptu livestream era: "So many good intentions, so little joy."

When the bedrock of the music industry-concerts and music festivals-becomes impossible, though, what can anyone do? Drive-in shows have recently become a thing, but those can't replicate the sheer scale (number of artists, stages, or fans) of even the smallest US music festivals. Most events simply embraced the livestream, like the annual counter-SXSW programming of Willie Nelson's annual Luck Reunion festival transforming into a coordinated set of at-home performances.

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