The music industry is adapting to the new reality of the COVID-19 pandemic. Musicians who would normally be on tour, playing music festivals around the country or at their local bars, are forced to stay home. Artists increasingly have depended on money generated from live performances, as revenues from album sales and online streaming have dwindled.
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“Most of the money comes from playing live shows,” says Tony "Smurphio" Laurencio. He and his partner Cristina “Cuci Amador” Garcia make up the Miami-based electrofunk duo Afrobeta. Cuci joked that live shows probably make up about 99.9 percent of the band’s income.
The group was scheduled to play a concert at the North Beach Bandshell Thursday, March 19. When the concert was canceled by the county’s emergency orders shutting down all “non-essential” businesses, the band started brainstorming.
“Remember we were in the living room and I was saying, ‘Maybe we should just stream it from our house'?", says Smurphio. “It could be at the same time we were supposed to play it because we had been looking forward to this show for a long time.”
They spoke with Karla Arguello at the non-profit Rhythm Foundation, their partner for the North Beach show, about promoting the livestream from home. Arguello had the idea to stream the concert from the North Beach Bandshell using a skeleton crew. The venue space allowed for a fog machine and a sound team on-site to monitor the audio streaming quality.
One of the big appeals of livestreaming for Afrobeta is the ability to interact with their audience in real time.
“What I heard from a lot of people that did get to watch it was that they felt like they had been isolated, without a lot of interaction with a lot of other people,” says Cuci. “All of a sudden they were watching this thing together as if they were at a show. Writing in the chat together was a lot of fun for them.”
Craig Southern first saw Afrobeta play more than a decade ago at the North Beach Bandshell. And that concert had a lasting impact on him. “They’ve been a part of my personal soundtrack ever since. I associate a lot of [their] songs with memories I have in Miami.”
He said the livestream lacked some of the magic of a live show, but it’s the next best way to connect with the group. It’s also a way for fans to support local musicians.
Afrobeta didn’t charge for their livestream, but commenters asked for their Venmo handle during the performance. Over the course of the show fans donated $175 to the band directly.
Musicians should also be getting support from the federal government. Under the $2.2 trillion relief package, musicians and songwriters who make under $100,000 annually can qualify for economic injury disaster loan grants. That doesn’t include the $1,200 which will be sent to anyone making under $75,000 a year — and artists can still apply for unemployment benefits.
Music can be a helpful escape from the news of the pandemic. Julio Reyes Copello is a Grammy-winning producer and the head of the newAbbey Road Institute in downtown Miami.
“You can actually create a parallel universe where you are free from your problems for 4 minutes, or 5 minutes, or however long a song lasts,” he says.
Copello has worked with Latin music legends like Ricky Martin, Jennifer Lopez and Alejandro Sanz. In the middle of March, Sanz had a concert scheduled with singer-songwriter Juanes in Bogota, Colombia, that was canceled due to COVID-19. Sanz and Juanes were both at home in Miami at the time, so they reached out to Copello to see if a live stream concert from his Abbey Road studio was possible.
“We’d been talking about this for a long time," Copello said. "I had all the structure in the studio to do it.”
The concert came together within a couple of days, broadcast from the artists' YouTube channel on a Sunday afternoon. More than 2 million people have watched the stream and there are hundreds of comments in English and Spanish from fans all over the globe.
There are no clear plans for Copello to work with the artists on another livestream, but he considered this one to be a great success.
“Our passion and our mission is to create music. It's food for the spirit," Copello says. "It’s going to create, no matter what, some peace of mind.”
Alejandro Sanz and Juanes performing at the Abbey Road Institute in Downtown Miami:
