Can Technology Make for Better Concerts?

Fans show off LED wristbands at a recent concert. (Image: Brandon Campbell)

It’s requisite concert behavior, the lighter in the air. A way to signal appreciation, commission an encore, and create a communal scene that is larger than the sum of its parts. It’s also definitively old school, having come of age at rock shows in the ‘70s and ‘80s, and while the flickering flames retain nostalgic allure, the feeling they seek to engender has not been addressed with much innovative flair over the intervening decades. (And no, iPhone virtual lighter apps don’t count.)

Justin Roddick and his team at Glow Motion Technologies are hoping to change that. With their patented LED wristbands, which can be programmed with a range of light patterns emitting any of 16 million colors, concertgoers are integrally involved in the show, serving as a key part of the set design. “It’s something else for the audience to both be a part of, and to look at,” explains Roddick. “And it’s a new part of the production industry; audience lighting is becoming the next big thing.”

The latest iteration of their wristbands debuted last week as country superstar Hunter Hayes’ Tattoo (Your Name) Tour kicked off in New York City. Glow Motion’s wristbands have been used before in live music events, and lights in the audience are nothing new (electronic music has a particularly strong track record), but “this tour is taking it to the next level,” says Roddick. “It’s the first tour that is truly using the technology to its fullest extent.”

The devices not only receive signals from a centralized control module, but they also can “talk to” each other, enabling a range of node-based effects. They operate at radio frequencies and thus don’t require a direct line of sight between transmitter and receiver. Other similar products in this space have traditionally used infrared wavelengths, which do, and it’s an important consideration for wrist-wear in a tightly packed crowd of thousands of people.

For his part, Hayes has firmly embraced the technology, and the early returns are promising. “When we got them going, it was breathtaking to watch from the stage,” he recalls. “I saw them all lift up and move around; people were really just playing around and having a good time with them.” Hayes pursued the wrist bands after sensing the potential of crowd-based lighting at a Coldplay concert. “With those wrist bands, it was mostly an on-and-off kind of thing,” he recalls from an Albany-bound tour bus. “I just kept thinking, there are a lot of advances to be made. There’s a lot you could do with it.”

One thing Hayes and production designer Paul Normandale have been experimenting with is a proximity feature that can send ripples outward through the crowd, or create a wave of light as the artist runs across the stage. Glow Motion can also fit the bands with accelerometers and other sensors, expanding the range of possible effects.

Critically, the technology straddles both sides of the concert experience: the spectacle and the personal. While an individual pixel in a sea of lights connects each fan into a larger scene, individuals can also be catered to. The bands synch with a purpose-built app into which fans can enter information like their favorite colors, their birthdays, and their music preferences. During the show, specific people may light up based on these data. (Ultimately, Glow Motion hopes, this sort of proximity-based technology and opt-in data sharing will be very attractive to vendors and sponsors.)

The first few nights of wrist band incorporation have been deliberate and relatively conservative roll-outs of the equipment, and Hayes is wary of coming on too strong. After all, much of the appeal of attending a concert is the artist-fan intimacy, and shattering any such connection with an over-wrought production can be disorienting. “I’ve definitely had designs in the past with a stage and a massive screen, but I ditched it because it was distracting,” Hayes says. “It didn’t contribute to the show, and the same could be said if you don’t do the wrist band right.”

Introducing novel reasons for fans to drop substantial cash on a concert is particularly urgent, as gate receipts make up an increasingly dominant part of an artist’s revenue in the era of anemic record sales and pervasive streaming services. But it’s also a challenge faced by other live events, the result of an arms race between improved video and home theaters on one side and more audacious “events” and the cache associated with attendance on the other. Efforts to draw patrons to live events have included over-the-top sports stadiums or elaborate give aways. Other strategies deconstruct the very form of a live event, turning a communal experience into an individual one. The Invisible Cities opera, for example, allowed attendees to wander Los Angeles’ Union Station in search of performers, as the music and vocals were transmitted through personalized headphones.

Intriguingly, the two forces of live event attendance and time-agnostic consumption need not be in full opposition. Evergig bridges the gap with an automated suite of software that stitches fan video into multi-angle re-creations of live concerts. It’s a service that sanctifies and preserves the concert experience. As company president Arthur Dagard says, “live music is all about being there, in the moment. Technology allows us to extend this moment in time and share it with our friends.” Computerized algorithms scour the internet for the best footage, score candidate videos based on 14 criteria (including face resolution and motion blur), enhance and synchronize the audio, and label tracks based on audio signatures. (The Hunter Hayes show from October 28th recently went live, and can be seen here.) With increasingly impressive cameras inhabiting smart phones and the rise of GoPro, the footage is only going to improve, all the better to glorify live concerts.

“If you do it right,” says Hayes, reflecting on the use of technological gambits, “it becomes an extension of the music. Everything really has to lend itself back to the music: that’s why you’re there.”