Live Streaming
for Live Nation
Concerts in a Pandemic
2020 • Product Design Lead
Responsibilities: Research, IA, UX, UI
Team: VP of Product, Director of Engineering, Director of Product, Frontend Engineers, Backend Engineer, QA, Third-party partners
Brief
When the COVID-19 pandemic started to spread in the United States, and live events ceased to exist, we had to think of alternative ways to implement our company mission of "Artist Powered. Fan Driven." Almost immediately, a slew of artists began performing living room concerts and broadcasting them on their respective social accounts. We quickly utilized existing components from our design language to reinvent our home page to display live streams from every artist, and every genre, from around the world powered by our in-house CMS.
Virtual concerts have proven to be in huge demand with fans, so we established the "Live From Home" platform to provide a convenient place for fans of all types to find performances from their favorite artists.
Almost a million fans have come to our ‘Live From Home’ site to find virtual tours and acoustic performances from home.
— Michael Rapino, Live Nation CEO, May 7, 2020
Then we took a step back and started to imagine what live streaming could be at Live Nation both during the pandemic, as well as after we're allowed to return to live, in-person entertainment.
Live streaming is something that Live Nation has dabbled in from time-to-time over the years. There have been one-off streams with individual artists, there have been deals with streaming partners, and there have been branded partnerships. But the interest from fans in live streaming has never fully caught on. We coalesced around the question of, how can we provide fans a unique and engaging experience that would that would be appealing when your favorite artist isn't touring in your area, or is out of your price range?
Process
We held several planning sessions centering around this central question, but quickly started to diverge along two paths. The first path for providing an appealing experience centered around the actual concert experience. Live Nation has a wealth of internal talent that travels the globe (during normal concert seasons) filming our artists & their performances and producing content for brands that want to partner with our artists. They went to work engaging some of the worlds foremost experts on audio & video live streaming quality to determine what it would take to ensure that watching a concert on the TV and sound system in your living room would be as high quality as possible.
The second path centered around the experience beyond the stream itself. From our competitive research we noticed that features like a live chat, and artist bio/background/portrait is pretty standard for any kind of live streamed event these days. Some of the ways we hoped to differentiate our experience was through multiple camera angles a fan could switch between during the show, thanks to our in-house content producing team. An in-show merch shop, which could include exclusive merch only available during the stream, thanks to our in-house artist merch team.
The structure of these live stream interfaces is pretty standard these days, so we did some quick wireframing to give us a place to start and were off to the races. To expedite the process of building a streaming platform in just a couple of months we engaged the services of a third-party vendor which was able to provide most of the basic functionality, and was eager to help us build out what remained.
Even though the scope of the test live stream shows we were working towards was limited, we set out on this project aiming to be forward-thinking. With that in mind we also gave thought to the extensive breadth of content under the Live Nation umbrella as we designed these screen. While we wouldn't be leveraging it for the test shows, live streaming the Live Nation festivals, or concert series from our own venues like the House of Blues could add to the fan experience. Similar to the strength of a service like Disney+ and its distinct brands like Pixar, Marvel, and Star Wars as well as its back catalog of content.
Lastly, since we were doing real live test shows with real live fans we had to create an end-to-end experience. That meant in addition to promoting these shows through our website, which we'd already incorporated, and our socials, and broadcasting the live stream, we also needed to have integrated ticketing. Live Nation has a variety of ticketing platforms — including Ticketmaster, Universe, Front Gate — that typically service different use cases. We also had the option of utilizing the purchase flow of our third-partying streaming partner. We ultimately decided to pair the backbone of our core Ticketmaster service with the streamlined flow of our third-party vendor to allow us to test both our native flow as well as a streamlined flow. The downside though was syncing these two systems for real-time purchase an authentication. This required extensive user flow explorations and iterations while we worked to simplify this as much as possible so it would be user-friendly, while staying within the technical limitations of our selected systems.
The final piece of the system were the post-purchase emails a user would receive. Normally these are overseen by another team. Since the company was so short-staffed during the pandemic, and because we were in charge of the UI for the rest of the experience we took this on as well. We wanted to make sure it was something that was straight forward, easy to use, and would make sense to the user not just when they received it, but also when the the day of show rolled around and they went looking back for this email.
Live Nation kicked off its live streaming experiments in earnest by partnering with Tidal to produce shows for Megan Thee Stallion and Lil Uzi Vert. Next up was a free live stream concert by Pink Sweat$ produced by our in-house production staff. All of that was building up to ticketed live stream concerts by Scarypoolparty and AWOLNATION from the Live Nation-owned Wiltern theater in Los Angeles. Most of the products I've designed in the past culminate in some sort of launch day, or scaled rollout to the browsers and phones of users, so it was a fun change of pace to be able to sit back and take in the experience of a summer of hard work from the comfort of my living room the same way many fans were experiencing it.
We’ve had over 67 million people watch virtual shows from their home
— Joe Berchtold, Live Nation President, August 20, 2020
Results
The revenue and ticket sales numbers of the test shows weren't released. But the financial investments Live Nation has made in live streaming after this project was completed speaks for itself. In January fo 2021, Live Nation acquired a majority stake in Veeps , a live streaming company founded in 2017 by Joel and Benji Madden of Good Charlotte fame, as well as Sherry Saeedi and Kyle Heller. Then in April of 2021, Live Nation announced that it was equipping more than 60 of its venues with turnkey live streaming technology for the Veeps platform. That kind of investment doesn't come without a high degree of confidence in the future of live streaming, born out of the work we did during the summer of 2020.
In the second quarter, we had 67 million fans view over 18 thousand concerts and festivals globally. Among our highlights, this past weekend we streamed 150 performances for our Virtual Lollapalooza Festival. Given the tremendous popularity of these shows, we are seeing the potential for live streaming to become an additional long-term component of our concert business, allowing fans in other cities, or those who can’t attend, to enjoy the concert as well.
— Michael Rapino, Live Nation CEO, August 5, 2020