Beyond Boiler Room: Exploring the Future of Creator-Led Streaming

In the last decade, live streaming videos of DJs and musicians have gone from novelty to ubiquity. When grainy transmissions started emerging from South London basements during the height of the post-dubstep era, Boiler Room felt like, if not exactly a revolution, something of a sea change. DJing and clubbing, an art form forever premised on the idea that you have to be there to catch its ephemeral nature, all of the sudden became archived. And, for better or worse, this meant that all those things that usually happened in the dark were written into the internet's memory forever - from that dude who ate a full burrito during a Toro Y Moi set to this moment that marked the stratigraphic rise of Sherelle.

It's not coincidental that this rise has coincided with the dominance of social media. We live in a moment where virality is synonymous with visuality. Just log onto Instagram on a Monday morning and look at the story from your favorite musicians as they post and repost footage from their sets (Berghain withstanding). If it feels like we've reached a fever pitch, it's because lockdowns accelerated both the need and the prevalence of live streams. When we couldn't actually hang out and dance together, there was something necessary about tuning in and seeing familiar names pop up in chat rooms. But, what was also clear, was the quality of those streams varied vastly, from shaky iPhone footage from a snake plant-filled living room to David Guetta's on top of a building in Dubai (or, even worse, the notorious shout-outs during his New York Covid-stream). 

Understanding the necessity and the asymmetries of live streams is what drove our most recent research project in partnership with Livepeer— a decentralized video streaming protocol— trying to think through what the future of live streams might look like and, also, crucially, how Web3 technologies might intervene and help us rethink how we conceive of those streams. Web2 social media websites - from Instagram to TikTok - have created a marketplace where short clips are the lingua franca for everyone from fans trying to connect with an artist they love, to PRs looking to get their artists bigger and bigger gigs. This economy also offers us a glimpse of how unhealthy our current media ecosystem is. These streams have been hollowed out and turned into a marketable 15-seconds of people trying to top-down manufacture a moment.

The fractured and uneven economy of audio-visual work for creators is what led Refraction to collaborate with Livepeer-powered video applications, RAD Radio and StreamETH, for our Refraction Miami event this past year. Using RAD's alternative streaming platform, alongside production support from the StreamETH and Miami Commmunity Radio teams, we created video accompaniments for our DJ sets which were streamed on a bespoke, decentralized platform. This opened our collective eyes to what the future of video might look like, but also underlined how challenging entering this space is for many artists. 

These sentiments were amplified by a group of creators who sat down to think through the future of live streaming with Refraction. In partnership with Livepeer, we convened a series of focus groups and sent out a survey asking artists how they think about streaming in their own practice. Sifting through these responses, it's easy to see that musicians understand that visuality is the language of the internet and that, of course, musicians need to adapt to this. But, as anyone who has tried to broadcast a mix from two turntables in their pal's garage will tell you, actually doing a stream is hard. 

There are a lot of moving pieces. Sure, you can strap on a GoPro and pray that the perfectly timed transition from half-time drum & bass into 160 BPM footwork is going to send you to the stratosphere, but effective live streaming requires a suite of tools and expertise that continually raise the barrier to entry. Through the course of our research, we kept coming back to the fact that creators are invested in building out a more integrated audio-visual experience for fans, but they also couldn't figure out what tools were in place to enable this.

What also came out in this research was the fact that there is a broken model of ownership when it comes to live streams. This is part of a larger problem with Web2 technologies. In the unending doom spiral of existing media networks, artists create content for free, fans watch the content driving engagement on the platforms, and the only people who really win out are the advertisers who are trying to hustle you on face creams and hiking shoes. 

What our research laid bare was the fact that musicians - and fans - are interested in what a more interactive experience of a livestream might look like outside of smashing that like button or commenting "Track ID?" What might it look like, in other words, for fans and creators to be able to interact through a live streaming marketplace. What would happen if you were able to create tokens or NFTs that allowed fans to own the viral moments that catapult their favorite artists into sustainable careers, and financially demonstrate their commitment to the artist while doing so? 

These findings are driving our next steps with Livepeer in trying to think through the future of live streams from an artist-led perspective. Alongside artists in the Refraction network, we're building a new live streaming video tool powered by our existing Regenerate software. Regenerate is a video editing technology that allows artists to manipulate and play around with video in real time. Our goal is to explore what it might mean to integrate this into Livepeer-powered video streaming technology, and to ensure artist feedback and testing is encouraged and incorporated throughout the design process. We’re interested in investigating how advancements in decentralized and machine learning technologies can improve the video editing and streaming process, and how these same technologies can be used to enhance the artist and audience relationship. 

Based on our research, it's clear that there is a demand for tools that democratize the audio-visual technology that drives effective live streams. We want to build a platform that would allow creators to upload existing audio - whether that is a full DJ mix or a single track - onto a platform and then pair it with visual themes that are designed by our community of Refraction visual artists. These visual themes would be adaptable, allowing both creators and fans to interact with them, creating bespoke audio-visual pairings that doesn't require every single musician to also hold a Master's Degree from the Rhode Island School of Design. 

The dream here is to not only add slick and compelling graphics to the occasionally sterile world of watching someone hunched over a laptop on a stage, but to foundationally think through how artists and fans interact. Live streaming has already irrevocably altered how we think of live performances, transcending space and bringing more and more people into conversation with the artists they love. But this is where we've stopped, reaching an economic and technological impasse. Our hope is that we can begin to think past these quickly aging paradigms, looking ahead to the potential enabled by blockchain technology to make live streaming more compelling, creative, accessible and, importantly, how this might be able to continue to support an alternative ecosystem of the arts not beholden to the whims and fancies of tech giants.  

Refraction and Livepeer are excited to announce an experimental audio-visual livestream to celebrate and further interrogate this research, utilizing the Regenerate software to bring Refraction’s events archive to life. Through the facilitation of novel collaborations between visual artists and musicians, we seek to gather new insights about the way artists and audiences incorporate and interact with new technology. Keep an eye on our social media in the coming weeks to learn more and tune in.