YouTube’s official livestream of the 2023 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival captured the event through both a long-form, professional livestream on YouTube, and short-form video user-generated content (UGC) on YouTube Shorts. YouTube partnered with influencers to document their festival run on Shorts, taking advantage of the growing trend of consumers recording content (and even livestreaming) at concerts. Of course, the two formats are very different: short-form video is short, archived video, while livestreams are long-form and streamed in real time. Even so, many fans are turning to UGC for the same reasons they may turn to a livestream.
This became abundantly clear when YouTube announced that it would not stream Frank Ocean’s highly anticipated headlining set, mere hours before it was set to begin. While the move was ostensibly meant to heighten exclusivity, it did nothing to prevent access, as thousands of attendees posted clips and livestreams of the performance to TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. One Instagram Live guerrilla stream from the musician @Morgandoesntcare drew at least 130,000 views. Unlike professional, polished livestreams, these videos gave viewers an understanding of the event’s cultural impact by offering a glimpse at what it was like to be on the ground. YouTube came out a winner in the end, as the lack of a YouTube stream helped boost activity on Shorts.
There is still a place for professional, high-quality livestreams. However, livestreaming platforms, promoters, artists, and artist teams alike must work out how to fit UGC into the puzzle. They could ramp up partnerships with influencers and superfans to post videos and even livestreams on the ground, and sell sponsorship opportunities tied to that content. Users could also sell livestream and in-person concert tickets through buttons on their videos, as Ticketmaster has done in partnership with TikTok. At Coachella, the filmmaker Brian Kinnes even stitched together 100 UGC videos of the Ocean performance to create a concert film — a process once formalised by the now-defunct app Vyclone. Kinnes understandably received a cease-and-desist from Coachella’s parent company, but in the future, festivals might create such “found footage” concert films themselves.