Splendour XR: Place, Experience and Liveness at a Virtual Music Festival

Abstract

A popular turn to online live music in response to the COVID-19 pandemic included the staging of so-called virtual music festivals, including Splendour XR, an ‘extended reality’ version of Australia’s largest ticketed music festival in 2021. Where the ‘liveness’ of online performance is now broadly accepted, a virtual music festival necessarily makes a more ambitious claim, as popular music festivals are valued for their construction of certain types of place affording particular kinds of experience. This article considers this claim in light of the history and meaning of popular music festivals, including the role of mediating technologies, before presenting a case study of Splendour XR drawing on primary research at the event. The article explores key issues for the online delivery of popular music festivals including the negotiation of liveness, the construction of place and the music festival experience.

Keywords:

• digital liveness
• extended reality
• live music
• music festivals
• virtual reality

Introduction

Live music is valued for its capacity to create unique settings for particular kinds of experience. This capacity is developed in music festivals, which are places in which certain cultural, social and economic values of live music are realized to a maximal extent. Building on a model established by 1960s rock festivals, popular music festivals have proliferated and become a major feature of global music industries and cultures. Technological change has been central in the development of live music and festivals. A current area of innovation is the use of digital media for remote consumption of live music, including the recent escalation of livestreaming as well as the more tentative emergence of virtual and extended reality festivals. These pose new questions about the meaning and value of live music and festivals, while facing substantial challenges in reproducing the sought-after experiences.

When the COVID-19 pandemic curtailed live events in many parts of the world, the crisis brought renewed attention to their social and economic importance and provided urgent impetus for industries, artists and audiences to explore remote and online options. One large-scale innovation was Splendour XR, an extended reality version of Australia’s largest music festival (by ticket sales), advertised as a ‘world first’ when it was held in July 2021 (Splendour XR, 2021). In place of the three-day Splendour in the Grass festival that attracts up to 50,000 people each year to a rural location in Byron Bay, New South Wales, Splendour XR staged musical performances and other attractions in a digital recreation of the festival site, which patrons accessed through virtual reality headsets and other digital devices. Promotion and commentary framed Splendour XR as a temporary replacement, as well as a trial for new forms of access to future festivals. However, while the discursive claim of online ‘live’ music seems to have achieved broad acceptance, an online music festival necessarily makes further claims and presents additional challenges. The viability of such events beyond the pandemic context remains to be seen. Tourism and events scholars have proposed that virtual events will gain in frequency and importance in conjunction with advancing technology and travel risks—as borne out in recent years—but also that these will remain an addition, not a substitution, for live event experiences (Getz, 2012; Seraphin, 2021). The detailed prognosis for the festival sector following COVID-19 is thought to depend on broader economic frameworks (Davies, 2021), which seem to be following the model of robust capitalism with selective state support—as demonstrated in the case of Splendour XR, discussed below. Although the rise of online music festivals, especially in the pandemic context, is acknowledged in scholarly literature, there has been little detailed study of the phenomenon. Both scholars (Anderton, 2021) and those involved in festival production (Bossey, 2022) believe the significant challenge is to replicate the overall experience of festival attendance, which this article will explore.

This article investigates online popular music festivals with attention to what they promise and provide in terms of place, liveness and experience. First, I outline the history and defining features of popular music festivals, with a focus on their construction of certain types of place and experience according to the literature. Next, I consider how mediating technologies have contributed to the development of these festivals as well as the changing meaning of live music, including the advancement of livestreaming during the pandemic. I summarize prominent approaches to online music festivals before turning to Splendour XR, which is significant for its novel combination of these approaches as well as its large scale. Drawing on primary research undertaken at Splendour XR, I present detailed observations of the festival site and spaces; visual and sonic features; approaches to virtual musical performance; and audience participation. Based on these observations, I consider what Splendour XR reveals to be key issues for the online delivery of popular music festivals. The event’s approach to liveness, and the reception of this claim by participants, demonstrate the technical limitations of virtual music festivals but also the value placed on the co-presence of audience members, as compared to performers. The construction of place, by the organizers and importantly by those who participated, illustrates how festival places can manifest virtually. As to the challenge of approximating the celebrated music festival experience, Splendour XR as a virtual analogue of an established physical event provides valuable insights. While the event arguably exceeded expectations about the capacity for emotional, social and unpredictable experiences, these were limited by obvious practical barriers. A critical issue was the lack of separation from everyday life, which inhibited the possibilities for freedom, escape and collective transcendence for which music festivals are so highly valued. Like other approaches to online live music that proliferated during the COVID-19 pandemic, Splendour XR responded to an immediate social need while demonstrating both possibilities and difficulties for future development.

Popular music festivals, places and experiences

This article is primarily concerned with music festivals oriented around popular music, also known as ‘pop festivals’ (McKay, 2015). These include rock festivals, with variants as diverse as metal, progressive, punk and roots, as well as festivals dedicated to electronic dance music and to genres at the boundary of popular music like blues, experimental, folk, jazz, noise and world music. They range in scale from so-called ‘boutique’ festivals, attended by hundreds of patrons for a single day or night, to major festivals like Glastonbury Festival (UK) and Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival (US) which host hundreds of thousands of people for multiple days. Across this spectrum, typical features are a purpose-built infrastructure, including performance stages as well as food, sanitation and accommodation; an outdoor setting, including rural locations as well as urban stadiums and parks; and the curated provision of live music with complementary artforms and activities, tending toward abundance with many festivals offering multiple stages and sub-venues.

The model for contemporary popular music festivals was established by US and UK rock festivals of the late 1960s, exemplified by the Woodstock Music and Arts Fair 1969 and emulated around the world. These events popularized associations between the practical features outlined above and countercultural politics, lifestyles and esthetics (see Bennett, 2004). There are earlier precedents for their key features: mid-century jazz and folk festivals were held in open-air settings and associated with political causes and subcultural groups (Laing, 2004; McKay, 2015), while classical music events of previous centuries were linked with regional destination tourism, including the provincial festivals of 18^th and 19^th century England that also incorporated nonmusical fringe events such as art exhibitions, flower shows and races (Drummond, 2011).

Festivals more generally have deep roots in ritual celebrations across human cultures, although their traditional role in affirming community and place now interacts with processes of pluralization, mobility and globalization (Bennett & Woodward, 2014, p. 1). Mikhail Bakhtin’s exposition of ‘carnival’, as a playful but powerful subversion of social hierarchies and norms, is often invoked in relation to the countercultural elements of modern music festivals. However, this too is placed in tension with commercialism (Anderton, 2020; Flinn & Frew, 2014), in conjunction with the tension between collective participation and spectatorship (Robinson, 2015). Since the 1960s the general trends have been from entrepreneurial to corporate organization, from countercultural carnival to commercialized spectacle, and from collective participation to industrially mediated consumption (Cummings, 2008; Laing, 2004), with music festivals now a part of the ‘experience economy’ (Flinn & Frew, 2014; Tschmuck et al., 2013). Alongside the modern mega-festival there has been a counter-movement of boutique music festivals, many of which de-emphasize performance lineups in favor of participative programming, with differentiation often achieved through complex visual displays, interactive installations, and fantastically themed environments (Robinson, 2015). The hundreds of festivals staged around the world each year (with the Music Festival Wizard website¹ listing 753 events for 2022) vary widely in their details. Essentially, however, they create certain kinds of place, through environmental, esthetic, social and musical elements, as settings for particular kinds of experience.

The places and experiences created by music festivals are central to their cultural and economic significance. While literature often focuses on their ephemeral and liminal qualities, Chris Anderton (2020, pp.125-7) argues that the creation of an identifiable, ‘cyclic place’ provides a sense of continuity, familiarity and belonging that may be crucial for the longevity of annual festivals. While a festival might last for one or several days at a time, it is perceived and remembered by festivalgoers as a ‘real’ place, with its own entertainment, goods, services and facilities accompanied by specific histories, rules, culture and meanings, reinforced by media representations. This notion of cyclic places allows festivals themselves to be considered in terms of the well-established relationship between music and place, which is more often applied to the cities that host festivals (Connell & Gibson, 2002). It also aligns with the concept of place attachment, utilized in recreation and tourism studies to consider how people’s relationships to places are shaped by experience and inform their behavior, including at music festivals (Alonso-Vazquez et al., 2019). Anderton (2020, pp. 111-12), following Henri Lefebvre’s model of the production of space, proposes that festival places are created through spatial practices, in routines and conventions such as all-day drinking, outlandish dress and acceptance of dirt; representations of space, such as maps, programmes and the commemorative images and videos posted by fans online; and spaces of representation, being the lived experience of the site by festivalgoers as distinct from those who may pass through it at other times for different purposes (although festival memories may infuse locations in lasting ways, as shown in the case of ‘street festivals’: Duffy, 2014). Research undertaken during the COVID-19 pandemic highlights the potency of people’s remembered attachments to festival places (Katczynski et al., 2022).

The experiences that people seek in festival places tend to be defined by certain themes: freedom or escape from everyday life, including through excessive consumption and relaxed social norms; authentic experience, involving heightened emotion and presence along with some level of professionalism and commerciality; belonging, felt and expressed among like-minded others in a safe and homely yet out-of-the-ordinary place; and self-transcendence, which may be occasional and momentary but nevertheless a key motivation (Anderton, 2020; see also McKay, 2015). These are features associated with live music more generally, which through its physical and cultural affordances creates affective space for extraordinary experiences and performances of self, including affirmation, transcendence, and belonging (Green, 2021). Festivals can be seen as an enhancement and elaboration of the affordances of live music, increasing the sense of a special place, quite separate from everyday life and time, shared by a group of people with common feeling and purpose.

However, some of the most memorable and defining features of the festival experience are not musical. Cummings and Herborn (2015) highlight embodied experiences of weather, landscape and crowds, such as the heat, sweat and skin contact of Australian summer festivals. This follows attention to physical and sensory experience in Duffy’s (2014) festival studies, including food and smells as well as collective dancing. Harper (2015) emphasizes the random interactions and tangential experiences that contribute to the uniqueness of live music. Examples include bumping into friends, the shared anticipation of walking with other people to a performance, interacting with performing artists, cheering as interlopers jump the fence and run from security, and even the difficulties of arranging transport and accommodation. Arguably a factor in the special nature of festivals is the increased opportunity they provide for these unpredictable elements, through their scale, duration and separation from everyday life and social norms. Harper (2015) suggests that these experiences could not be authentically replicated using existing digital technology. This connects with older and broader debates around liveness and mediation, which will now be considered.

Liveness and mediatization

While liveness and technological mediation are typically put in binary opposition, Auslander (2002) shows how the ‘live’ is an effect of mediatization. Live music only became a meaningful category after recording technology came into being, and the spread of radio broadcasting with its invisible sound sources created a social need for such a category (Auslander, 2012). Thus Auslander argues that liveness is not a characteristic of objects or media but an interaction, produced through our engagements with objects and our willingness to accept their claim. The relationship between liveness and mediatized forms is therefore historical and contingent. As mediating technologies have developed, concepts like ‘live broadcast’ and ‘live recording’ have become standard, while the concept of live electronic music, for example, has a narrower acceptance (Fritsch & Strötgen, 2012). Judgments of liveness in such newer cases might differ according to a technological generation gap (d‘Escriván, 2006), or music-cultural differences such as between rock and dance music audiences (Green, 2021). The stakes are high because of the relationship between live performance and authenticity in popular music, especially in the traditionally dominant rock ideology but also in various genres with their own nuanced standards (Auslander, 2002). Thus perceptions of liveness infuse people’s expectations and experiences of musical events, including festivals.

The contemporary music festival is a product of media technologies. Amplification allows music to be enjoyed by large audiences in the open air, often complemented by video screens (Auslander, 2002). Recording and broadcasting enable the mass consumption of music festivals, contributing to their cultural prominence. The generation-defining image of Woodstock was significantly bolstered by a documentary film and ‘live album’ (Bennett, 2004), while Live Aid in 1985 was fundamentally a mass-mediated event with transatlantic stadium concerts reaching over a billion television viewers via satellite (Garofalo, 1992). Since the 1990s, larger festivals have been the subject of curated highlights and ‘live broadcasts’ on television and radio, including the UK’s Glastonbury and Australia’s Big Day Out via their respective public broadcasters, underscoring their national status. More recently these are complemented by ‘livestreams’ through online platforms, such as the BBC iPlayer which is free to UK viewers and Coachella’s YouTube channel by paid access. Festival audiences contribute to mediatization by sharing photos, videos and commentary instantaneously via social media (Kjus & Danielsen, 2014), which creates the digitally mediated, social co-presence known as ‘online liveness’ (Couldry, 2004, p.356) while generating promotional content and exploitable data for festivals and their sponsoring brands (Carah & Angus, 2018).

The remote but simultaneous consumption of musical performances boomed in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic. The suspension of public live music events for months during 2020 and beyond, along with broader social restrictions in many countries, were disastrous for the industries involved in live music and festivals, resulting in financial losses, business closures, and large-scale job losses (Anderton, 2021). This, together with unmet popular appetites for musical entertainment and social connection, created the ‘supervening social necessity’ (Winston, 1998, pp.6-7) for mass investment in the preexisting technologies of livestreaming. Typical methods are summarized by Anderton (2021) and illustrated in Rendell’s (2021) study of live ‘portal shows’, ranging from an elaborately staged and filmed rock show to a domestic solo performance with a single camera, on social media platforms like Twitch.TV and Instagram as well as ticketed platforms like StageIt. These portal shows differed from the live broadcasts discussed above in several ways: they were performed to predominantly or entirely online audiences; they allowed remote text-based interaction; and, with performers and viewers participating from home, they were bound up with the pandemic-driven convergence of public and private space and time (observed by Fuchs, 2020). Portal shows were valued during the pandemic for providing some of the aesthetic experience and social connection associated with live music, with benefits for the subjective well-being of audiences and performers—including as important spaces of hope (Kelly Pryor & Outley, 2021)—even if they lacked key elements of in-person events (Green et al., 2022). In this context, their discursive claim of liveness was accepted widely. The claim made by an online ‘festival’ is more complex, given the elements outlined earlier.

Approaches to online music festivals

Several types of online music festival have come to prominence. Isol-Aid: An Instagram Live Music Festival, held on multiple weekends beginning in March 2020, was essentially a curated timetable of more than 70 artists performing for 20 minutes each on their respective Instagram Stories (in real-time and usually accessible for 24 hours), mostly self-filmed on personal devices at home, with viewers encouraged to donate to the Support Act charity for Australian music industry workers (Newstead, 2020). This approach of curated livestreams, also employed by the Bandsintown LIVE Music Marathon ‘virtual festival’ on Twitch.TV and the Uncancelled Music Festival on StageIt (both also linked to fundraising efforts) stakes its festival status on the cumulative performance of multiple artists. In contrast to the collective, escapist pilgrimage of a typical outdoor festival, these events tended to emphasize the domestic isolation of their participants as a source of novelty and solidarity, early in the pandemic. A variant of this approach was undertaken by Wireless Connect Festival, with a more unified and elaborate presentation but a different concept of liveness. Performers were pre-filmed onstage at London’s Alexandra Palace or in a Los Angeles studio for 360° virtual reality broadcast (Anderton, 2021), offering an immersive concert experience to viewers, with the unusual elements of extreme proximity to the performers and no visible audience.

Other online music festivals construct discrete festival spaces, albeit virtual ones, using computer graphics. Tomorrowland, an annual Belgian event founded in 2005 and billed as the world’s largest electronic dance music (EDM) festival, as well as Hydeout which was first scheduled in Singapore in 2020, exemplified one approach when their physical events were canceled during the pandemic (Mitchell, 2021). Both used three-dimensional modeling to generate elaborate virtual stages and fantastical landscapes, into which performances pre-filmed in green screen studios were inserted at scale, then ‘filmed’ for broadcast by swooping virtual cameras amid animated lights, pyrotechnics and revelers. Ticket purchasers could view the broadcasts live at the scheduled time, choosing between stages while interacting with other viewers via chat and games. Essentially, these festivals follow the model of a paid-access online broadcast of a physical music festival, such as Coachella’s YouTube livestreams, with the addition of computer-generated settings and digitally mediated interactions between audience members.

Another approach to creating a virtual festival space uses open world gaming platforms such as Minecraft and Second Life. In these, participants navigate three-dimensional virtual sites as customizable avatars, with a third- or first-person point of view including a virtual reality option with appropriate hardware, interacting with others through user-controlled gestures and dancing as well as typed chat and speech (see Harvey, 2016). Performing acts appear as avatars, or on cinema-like screens within the virtual setting. A prominent, early example was Secondfest, a three-day festival staged in Second Life in 2007 with more than 30 performers including the Pet Shop Boys, while the referentially-named Coalchella was staged in Minecraft in 2018. The COVID-19 pandemic inspired a revival of interest in music festivals in open world gaming platforms, including Minecraft festivals Square Garden organized by hyperpop duo 100 Gecs, Electric Blockaloo headlined by electronic music performer Diplo, and Nether Meant featuring emo band American Football. The platforms and networks through which such events are accessed impose critical limitations. Due to the ‘lag’ involved in remote, digitally networked interactions, performers typically present prerecorded music, footage and sometimes avatars (see Gagen & Cook, 2016), while a limited number of users can inhabit the same virtual location at the same time, varying with server capability but typically around 50. Within these parameters, performers and other participants have negotiated the meaning of liveness in creative ways, suggesting new possibilities for live music events, in much the same way that multitrack sound recording enabled a departure from replication to a more fundamental reconstruction of musical reality (Gagen & Cook, 2016; Harvey, 2016). A significant benefit of virtual events is their accessibility, including for people with disabilities (Kent & Ellis, 2015). However, virtual events as described here seem to pose direct challenges to the understandings of place and experience that are central to music festivals, as discussed above. Both the challenges and possibilities are explored in the following case study of Splendour XR, which combined aspects of the different approaches to online music festivals outlined here.

Case study: Splendour XR

Splendour in the Grass began in 2001 as a single-day music festival, with a boutique character premised on its relatively small attendance of 12,500 patrons, its location on the outskirts of the bohemian coastal township of Byron Bay, and its unique (southern hemisphere) winter staging in July. By 2020, Splendour was Australia’s largest music festival, spanning three days at private festival parklands, selling all 50,000 tickets within an hour of their February release (The Music Network, 2020). However, within three weeks the festival was postponed due to COVID-19, and two months later canceled altogether (Newstead, 2020), then canceled again the following year. In the meantime, festival organizers Secret Sounds Group (a subsidiary of Live Nation Entertainment) were awarded $1.5 million as part of the Australian government’s Restart Investment to Sustain and Expand (RISE) fund ‘to develop a festival that will keep audiences connected while also reaching new audiences across Australia and overseas’ (Morris, 2020). The result, presented on Saturday 24 and Sunday 25 July 2021, was Splendour XR.

Splendour XR utilized the open world gaming platform Sansar to present a virtual, three-dimensional recreation of the real festival site. For the duration of the festival, ticket purchasers with high-powered ‘gaming’ computers or virtual reality headsets could navigate the site freely, for example by walking between stages and landmarks, as a unique avatar with the ability to talk to others nearby. Users with standard computers and portable devices could select from a range of static viewpoints, interacting without an avatar through text-based chat. More than 50 pre-filmed performances were presented within the various spaces, according to a typical festival timetable, with a separate fee for subsequent on-demand viewing. Almost all musical performances were created exclusively for Splendour XR (one exception being a previously-filmed performance of The Avalanches before an audience at Sydney’s Enmore Theatre). The festival website and social media pages promoted food and drink delivery businesses, as well as 'party packs’ including Splendour branded signs and lights, a drink cooler bag, cups, coasters and straws, encouraging group viewing. Other aspects that crossed into the everyday physical realm included an online medical center ‘to assist any patrons who are struggling with their mental health in this Covid world’; guided yoga sessions; a children’s entertainment area; encouragement to donate to selected charities; and commitment to a minimal carbon footprint (Splendour XR, 2021).

I obtained approval from Griffith University research ethics committee (reference 2021/526), as well as festival organizers Secret Sounds Group, to undertake participant observation at Splendour XR. The value of participatory observation for exploratory case studies of particular categories of online music events is demonstrated by Rendell (2021). Participant observation is established more broadly in the ethnographic study of virtual worlds, such as Second Life and open-environment multiplayer games (Boellstorf et al., 2012). As in traditional ethnographic research, the intention is to gain insight into shared practices, meanings and social contexts, through direct involvement and intimate observation, with reflexive attention to the researcher’s subject position. In this study, participant observation was employed to explore in particular the audience experience of an online music festival, in light of the expected festival experience described above. My participation included navigating the festival site, attending musical performances and other attractions, and observing the presence and behavior of others through avatars and chat. I recorded my observations in field notes, including reflections on my own participation and experiences. My observations were recorded in such a way as to preserve the anonymity of participants, and accordingly I have shared only generic and anonymised chat quotes below. I accessed the festival through my laptop and Android device, in my home and as passenger in a car. Sometimes I shared the screen to my loungeroom television, and I was occasionally joined by my partner and/or primary school-aged child. By way of further context for my observations, I have attended six stagings of Splendour in the Grass along with a number of other music festivals and I regularly participate in live music events. I will now summarize my observations about the festival site and spaces, visual and sonic elements, participant avatars, musical and other performances, and interpersonal interactions through avatars and chat.

Site and spaces

Upon entering the festival close to opening time at midday, I used an on-screen menu to explore the virtual spaces. Without a gaming computer or VR headset I was limited to a selection of static viewpoints rather than moving freely within the site. These included viewing angles outside each space (e.g. the door of a tent); to the rear and sides of the audience area as well as nearer the stage; and a full screen performance view. The Entrance represented the outdoor space immediately inside the gates of the physical festival site, including a NSW Police donger containing a computer and coffee mug on a desk as well as two static ‘sniffer’ dogs; a medical tent with curtains drawn, which was occasionally staffed by an avatar (a male nurse or a stuffed dog with a ‘Staff’ sign floating above); and shopfronts for Nike sportswear and the Moodagent streaming platform, which contained links to information and websites. Other spaces included The Wilds, comprising a Smirnoff Seltzer branded bar with LGBT and gender diverse pride flags above the door, and a link to the Jimmy Brings alcohol delivery service that appeared when the bar was approached; the Triple J tent, representing Australia’s public youth radio network (that developed alongside the all-ages music festival scene in the 1990s) with a screen showing edited footage from past Splendour festivals; the Global Village and Forum, representing their physical counterparts that host talks, standup comedy and cultural performances, in this instance pre-filmed; Little Splendour, representing the children’s entertainment space, screening television shows and filmed performances; The Amphitheatre, a ‘main stage’ in a large natural amphitheater; the GW McLennan stage, a big top with tiered seating around a grassy floor; the Mix Up tent, an electronic dance music venue with stage and grassy dancefloor; and the Tipi Forest, a ring of tipis surrounding an outdoor dancefloor with psychedelic lighting. While these all mirrored their physical counterparts, with other spaces and the festival landscape often visible in the distance, as well as realistic ambient sounds of crowds and music, there were obviously unreal elements throughout the site.

A prominent unreal feature was the Triple J tent, which was shaped as a three-dimensional version of the radio station’s logo: a red and white snare drum with three sticks hovering impossibly above. Behind the Amphitheatre stage loomed massive mushrooms, and trees around the site were accompanied by fountains of light, while glowing shapes occasionally descended like confetti from the sky. The landscape and infrastructure were not photorealistic but had the simplified, geometric appearance of an open world video game. The Wilds bar had giant, smiling sunflowers outside its door and contained an open fire pit, which would almost certainly not be seen in the physical space for safety reasons. The Tipi Forest had the most spectacular visual elements, such as colorfully glowing mushrooms, floating specks of colored light, and a glowing peace symbol in the center of the clearing, all of which fit as virtual extensions of the psychedelic character of the usual, physical space. Around the site were floating text signs reading ‘DONATE HERE’ or ‘Support Act’, in reference to the charity for music industry workers. However, the most spectacularly unreal elements of the festival were the avatars.

Avatars

Participants with the requisite hardware were able to select from Splendour XR avatars, representing human festival attendees, or to create or import avatars from the Sansar platform. Some avatars looked like humans in festival attire, such as raver clothes, colorful hair, body lights, fairy wings, and costume elements like giant animal heads, antlers and tails. However, most tended toward the fantastical: cartoon shark, giraffe, mech suit, robot, alien, Lego person, tiny glowing dinosaur, chocolate frog, troll doll, eggplant with arms and legs, skull head, human hand walking on fingers, glowing human nervous system. Their behavior resembled participants in a video game more than humans at a festival: standing still; sporadically walking or running, including into walls and objects; dancing or swaying on the spot; jumping to superhuman heights and onto infrastructure and other avatars; lying on the ground and floating above it. During performances the avatars usually faced the stage, and danced and moved in more audience-like ways. Paradoxically, it was the unnatural, awkward movements of the avatars that indicated they were operated by human controllers. As a non-avatar participant, I could not hear any speech between avatars, but in social areas there was a steady, recorded soundtrack of low crowd noise. While I was amused by the avatars and enjoyed the co-presence of a visibly active audience, I did not feel connected to the avatars in the way that I usually feel belonging at live music events. My impression, whether fair or not, was that the avatars represented ‘gamers’ with practices, knowledge and motivations different to my own, as a non-gamer and regular live music attendee.

A strange element of all festival spaces, especially as the event progressed and ‘night’ fell, was the relatively low number of visible avatars. Due to the technical limitations described earlier, Splendour XR ran numerous parallel instances of the festival site, each containing a certain number of avatar-based participants, so that anyone attending could only see about 20 avatars at a time. As a result, the audience areas and dancefloors looked under-attended compared to a physical music festival. It was not possible to visually estimate how many people were attending Splendour XR, in stark contrast to the constant awareness of a massive crowd at the physical festival. At times during the performances I felt dispirited by this relative emptiness, which highlights the role of the crowd in my usual festival experience (as echoed in critical reporting on the event: D’Souza, 2021).

Performances

Another consequence of technical limitations was that all performances were prerecorded. Musical performances were of a standard duration for a festival (e.g. 30 minutes for earlier acts, an hour for headliners), but varied in their presentation style. Some acts, especially bands, presented a film of an apparently live performance—in a studio or rehearsal room (e.g. Icelandic five-piece Of Monsters and Men), a domestic setting (e.g. DJ Kaytranada surrounded by revelers at a backyard party), a scenic location (e.g. solo singer-guitarist Vance Joy on a Barcelona rooftop), or on a stage with performers facing forward (e.g. headlining band The Killers). Most performances included stage-talk (e.g. ‘Thanks for being here with us’, ‘Scream Splendour!’, and Vance Joy’s ‘We just left a pause there for the crowd, we can’t hear you but we know you’re there’), which contributed some sense of liveness and presence—or at least exclusivity and purpose—to the pre-recordings. However, the use of multiple cameras, close-ups and professional editing styles gave some performances the character of music videos, while others could pass for a polished version of the live feed shown on video screens beside a festival stage. The stage-based performances, even those filmed in a television-style studio, seemed to fit more seamlessly on a virtual stage.

I preferred the viewing angles that included some of the avatar audience and stage setting, with matching (recorded) crowd sounds, as these provided a sense of place and occasion. Some solo singers were filmed without a backing band or other visible source of music, which I found jarring, though perhaps non-musicians or singer-focused pop fans would have been less concerned. Several acts filmed their performances using green screen, enabling them to be placed at scale in the three-dimensional stage setting (e.g. rock band King Gizzard and the Lizzard Wizzard; UK pop singer Charlie XCX; DJ duo Hot Dub Time Machine). Despite the grainy, low resolution appearance of the resulting figures, I found these to be by far the most immersive performances, enabling me to feel like the performers and I were both ‘there’. This was especially effective when Hot Dub Time Machine’s prerecorded figure directed the audience to ‘crouch down’, ‘jump’, and so on, in time with the music. However, the opinions of my fellow audience members varied widely on these points, as apparent from the chat.

Audience responses and interactions

Throughout my attendance at Splendour XR I kept the chat window open and this provided my main perspective on other audience members, beyond the handful of visible avatars. From opening time, people used the chat to introduce themselves—for example, naming the city or country they were watching from, which provoked conversational responses—as well as to ask questions about ‘set times’ and technical matters. A common chat practice was for participants to announce their anticipation of a certain act, typically drawing excited responses, echoing typical conversations with strangers at an onsite festival. Chat participants regularly offered feedback about not only performances (e.g. ‘This is giving me goosebumps’, ‘Why am I watching a music video?’, ‘Look at the astronaut on the dancefloor’), but also the event and platform, such as complaints about overlapping performances (an aspect of any multiple-stage festival) and the requirement to pay extra for on-demand viewing (an online-specific complaint). Some participants expressed their eagerness to ‘support’ live music, including Splendour and the artists, in direct response to such complaints.

The chat activity accelerated before and during the scheduled appearances of certain acts, including international pop stars, Charlie XCX and Grimes, as well as an afternoon performance in the Amphitheatre by Band Maid, an all-woman rock band who dress as maids and sing in Japanese. A series of new chat participants began expressing their excitement and counting down the minutes, to some bemusement and frustration from others. Some of the comments were in Japanese characters, compared to the almost universal use of English for the rest of the event. During the Band Maid set, filmed with multiple cameras on a studio stage, multiple users shared the names of songs as they started, seemingly in competition to be first, as well as praising band members and their performance (‘Kanami shredding it as always!’), resulting in a rapidly flowing chat. Some comments indicated that users thought the performance was occurring in real time, such as comments on the ‘live mix’, requests, and expressions of thanks to the band. Based on the different pace and style of the chat during this time, I had the impression that many of the ‘Maidiacs’ (as some called themselves) attended Splendour XR for this band only. Some users expressed disappointment with the duration of the performance, which was a standard festival length and much shorter than a headlining concert.

Throughout the event, some of the chat echoed communications at a physical event, while there were also references to domestic and everyday matters that would not usually encroach on a music festival. During performances there were exclamations (‘YESSS!”), descriptions of activity (‘singing along’, ‘SCREAMING’), and feedback to the performers (‘We’re here Vance!’, ‘You guys awesome!!’, multiple thanks and requests). There was a recurring theme of comments playing on festival conversations and activities, such as drug use (‘Can anyone spare a durry?’ [cigarette], ‘where’s the med tent I think these caps are meth’ [these capsules contain methamphetamine], ‘help im coming up too soon’ [drugs are taking effect]). Some users recommended performances (‘Whoever’s on McLennan right now are fab!’, ‘Come to Mix Up’). At the same time, the chat often resembled a typical online forum, with users politely excusing themselves for toilet breaks, meals and chores (‘BRB’: I will be right back), and conversing about unrelated topics like the day’s sporting events, relationships and jobs (‘I got called in to work’). This was consistent with my experience of Splendour XR, punctuated by breaks for meal preparation, grocery shopping and entertaining my child (including some viewing of children’s TV shows via the Little Splendour space), as well as taking notes on my laptop. Some chat conversations suggested potential offline connections (‘I’m in [city], let’s organize something and get some beers’), although chat moderators removed and warned against the sharing of personal information such as addresses. The ‘Event Help’ account often posted pro forma text reminding users this was an ‘all-ages event’ (so chat comments could be seen by children), sharing links to mental health services, and providing technical guidance in response to questions. While there were occasionally attention-seeking and mildly disruptive chat participants, these were largely met with good humor and moderate rebukes and I saw no threatening or abusive comments. After the last performance, a number of users posted thanks to other participants, event organizers and moderators (‘Thank you everyone who helped make Splendour XR happen! We really appreciate all the hard work! This was the best weekend I have had in a long time!’).

Discussion

Splendour XR combined elements of previous online music festivals at a large scale, to emulate as much as possible the physical Splendour in the Grass festival that was not staged for two years due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Accordingly, the event enables a level of direct (albeit unfair) comparison and highlights the challenges and opportunities of online music festivals. In particular, I will consider the construction of Splendour XR as a place, the liveness of the event, and the online approximation of the music festival experience discussed earlier in this article.

The virtual festival reproduced and, in some ways, extended the cyclic place developed over the lifetime of the Splendour in the Grass festival. Following Anderton’s (2020) schema based on physical festivals, this place was (re)created for Splendour XR through representations of space, including most importantly the virtual model of the festival site, as well as the spatial practices of participants including specific kinds of (real or imagined) consumption, dancing, dress (at home or via avatar) and interpersonal relations. While these practices appeared as conscious and sometimes strained, as demonstrated by the chat participants’ wishful parodies of festival behavior, this nevertheless emphasized a shared concept of Splendour as a cyclic place. Through colorful and quirky avatars, excited and familiar interactions, and self-conscious references to dancing, singing, emotional experience and hedonistic consumption, users co-produced a place with the broadly carnivalesque and countercultural aesthetics of popular music festivals. As in the physical Splendour festivals (Carah & Angus, 2018; Cummings, 2008), this was combined with the commercialism of prominent brands and corporate partners. Another element contributing to a distinctive sense of place and occasion was the shared ethical project of supporting an embattled live music and festival sector and specifically this festival, along with the consciously shared experience of festival-goers who had been deprived of their place-based pastime for over a year during a broader social crisis.

An interesting caveat to Splendour XR as a continuation of the festival’s cyclic place is suggested by the apparent surge of participants around specific acts. An online music festival, which is much cheaper and easier to access than an onsite festival, might attract partial attendance and unfamiliar audiences, with the potential to destabilize the cyclic place known to core patrons. To an extent this depends on the tasks of curation and design that face all music festival organizers. The capacity of festivals to reproduce or bridge social boundaries, through their potential for conviviality and encounters, is not guaranteed by mere proximity but depends to a degree on planning, including spatial design (Swartjes & Berkers, 2022). The question of virtual festivals as spaces of encounter requires further exploration.

Another defining aspect of the Splendour festival series is the delivery of appropriate performing artists, who are popular among the youth-oriented, alternative pop-rock audience and capable of delivering high quality festival performances. The Splendour XR lineup was comparable to other years in this respect. Interestingly, however, the ‘liveness’ of Splendour XR was not premised on the simultaneous presence of the performers, who were prerecorded, although the event mostly retained the exclusivity that is central to the marketing of music festivals (Robinson, 2015). The actual liveness of Splendour XR was based entirely on audience co-presence and co-consumption, as observed in previous virtual live music events (Gagen & Cook, 2016). Accordingly, following Robinson’s (2015) typology, Splendour XR combined elements of the lineup-based, spectator festival model and the collective participation model. While this approach was consequent on technical limitations, it also speaks to the centrality of inter-audience sociality in the live music and festival experience, even at a star-oriented event, which was borne out in the chat and avatar interactions.

Participants performed music festival identities through their spectacularly decorated avatars and socially oriented movements, mirroring the expression of belonging and identity through bodily decoration and behavior at physical festivals (Cummings, 2008), and through chat comments expressing love for artists and songs and describing physical responses. Chat participation showed the importance of shared tastes and simultaneous responses, with participants apparently keen to see and be seen among like-minded, collectively feeling fans. In these ways, the Splendour XR audience (or at least the visibly active portion) demonstrated a general acceptance of the liveness of the event. This was the online liveness (Couldry, 2004) of remotely located participants interacting in digital spaces, but there was less than universal acceptance of the liveness of musical performances. While some chat participants acted as if the musicians were performing in real time, others approached the performances more like watching a film together, with a few expressing disappointment (such as the user who complained they were ‘watching a music video’).

As to the festival experience, my insights are based on my own experience, the chat comments of others and published reviews. Some of the valued features of live music and festival experiences, as discussed earlier in this article, were present to a degree with important limitations. Most obviously, the embodied and sensory aspects of a music festival were substantially curtailed, lacking the physicality of music at high volume as well as the smells, tastes and haptic impressions of onsite attendance (Duffy, 2014). The virtual spaces and inter-audience communication channels of Splendour XR enabled at least some random interactions and tangential experiences, in partial contrast to Harper’s (2015) suggestion that these elements of live music could not be replicated digitally. The chat went some way to reproducing the effect of a group of strangers meeting in anticipation of a performance or simply encountering each other during a festival, including moments of humor and bonding over offstage events. However, on the whole there were less tangential and unpredictable elements given the lack of travel, accommodation and crowds.

Regarding the desired features of music festivals identified by Anderton (2020), some audience members exhibited the heightened emotion and presence associated with authentic experience, as well as the feeling of belonging among like-minded others in a familiar but special place. For some, this may have been sufficient to induce moments of self-transcendence, as indicated in the chat by exclamations and references to screaming or having goosebumps. However, it is likely that ecstatic experiences were limited by the absence of physical extremities such as very loud music and immersion in a thousands-strong crowd, together with the presence of mundane concerns and everyday environments. Despite indications of audience interest in excessive consumption and relaxed social norms, and the obviously fantastical elements of the virtual site and audience avatars, the embodied necessities of the remote, online format limited the capacity for an experience of extended freedom and escape. This was perhaps the most significant difference between Splendour XR and its in-person counterpart, as the virtual festival did not provide a place or experience defined by its separation from normal life but unavoidably integrated with it, requiring participants to balance contrasting settings and selves. Their experience of this balance may have varied according to such factors as physical environments, conflicting obligations, and familiarity with online leisure, but the mere existence of such variables is the essential difference. Like the smaller-scale portal shows observed by Rendell (2021), Splendour XR was marked by the pandemic-driven convergence of public and private space and time (Fuchs, 2020). For a would-be music festival, a category of event deeply associated with collective transcendence, such convergence is a more critical issue.

Conclusion

The basic technological prerequisites for online music festivals like Splendour XR have been available for more than a decade, but the COVID-19 pandemic created new material and social demands for their uptake. This occurred within a broader popularization of online live music events, as a way for those grieving the loss of their ‘splendour in the grass’ to find ‘strength in what remains behind’ (to adapt the poet William Wordsworth). Over at least two years when many of the world’s large-scale live events including festivals could not be staged, online versions were a consolation for consumers, an alternative revenue source for producers, and for some people an important source of social connection and well-being (Green et al., 2022). Beyond this context there are various reasons why the online presentation of music festivals might endure, including their potential to generate new sources of revenue, to increase accessibility and comfort, to reduce environmental impacts (Bossey, 2022) and to provide safe and reliable alternatives during future crises (such as the flooding that substantially disrupted the next physical Splendour in the Grass in July 2022 and caused the cancelation of numerous Australian festivals throughout the year.) This article has focused on two factors impacting these potentials: firstly, the social acceptance of discursive claims inherent in staging an online music festival, and secondly, the differences, challenges and opportunities involved in that staging.

Online live music events arguably achieved a new level of social acceptance with their broader uptake during the pandemic. Online music festivals make more ambitious claims, given the specific cultural meanings and motivations associated with popular music festivals as outlined in this article. A ‘festival’ is partly a matter of scale, in the number of performances and participants as well as overall duration, and while this poses practical difficulties for organizers (much like a physical festival), it is the least controversial aspect of the discursive construction of an online music festival. The common factor in all types of online music festival discussed in this article is the curated presentation of various performing artists in a single event. More complex and subtle challenges are posed by those qualitative features of music festivals which I have summarized in this article as the construction of a certain kind of place enabling certain kinds of experience.

Established festivals like Splendour in the Grass have an advantage in the virtual construction of a credible festival place. As discussed above, representation of the physical site was a central element of Splendour XR, and practices during the event acknowledged, reproduced and extended the cyclic place (Anderton, 2020) that is associated with, but not limited to that site. Online music festivals without such a history face a greater challenge, with one tactic demonstrated by the creation of unique and spectacular virtual spaces in Tomorrowland and Hydeout. Within virtual or extended festival places, there is potential for attendees to experience to some degree the identification, belonging, emotional (co-)presence and festive sociality that are typically sought in music festivals, building on the broader social acceptance of online liveness (Couldry, 2004). Notably, the analysis of Splendour XR demonstrates how online participation can allow for some of the random, unpredictable and tangential experiences that contribute to the music festival experience. As with all remote and online live music events, there is an obvious physical and sensory difference. Most significantly, online participation limits the separation from everyday life, and transcendence of normality, that have been recognized as key features of popular music festivals (and other types of festival: Simons 2021). This tethering to mundanity is a challenge for any online presentation of live music, as observed in other studies, but especially important in the case of festivals given the meanings they have accrued. Accordingly, for the foreseeable future, online music festivals are likely to remain a distinct category of event, with practical benefits and crucial limitations, from the perspective of those who would participate in them.

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Andy Bennett and the anonymous reviewers for their feedback on earlier versions of this manuscript, and Secret Sounds for their permission to undertake research at Splendour XR.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 https://www.musicfestivalwizard.com (accessed 9 August 2022).