The Results are In! What is Will Take for Live Music to Come Back
Today’s Artist of the Day: Jungol
Okay, okay, so let's dive right into it. Today's topic is talking about how to safely put together a concert. It seems like the Germans have figured out how to do it, and guess what? It involves wearing a mask.
A while ago, a German group began this experimental concert type stuff to see how they were going to jump start the live concert music industry again, and they were gonna put on these concerts and expose people to Covid and do all sorts of different things, or they were going to at least put a bunch of people in the room, test them before they go in and see if anybody came out with it, or just all kinds of weird crazy experiments. Just trying to figure out how in the world do we get back to normal. Well, there's test results are back and there's some really interesting data that I'd like to share with you, but first a little back story for the people who did not read that post. So back in July, a bunch of scientists got a whole bunch of people together and it was like around 4000 or so, and they just tested a whole bunch of different scenarios and figure out how they could have concerts again, because we all miss concerts and I miss playing them. And a lot of the people that love going to concerts and spend a lot of their money going to concerts, they missed them too, so the whole system is completely destroyed. They just were the first to really organize and say, Hey, we're gonna try and come up with a solution. So here are some of the results that they found, and also here are some of the parameters that they used to do the study.
So without further ado, let's get into it. This whole entire project was actually called Restart 19, which is pretty funny because they could have called it restart 2020 and that would have probably been even better, but I digress. So on August 22nd, they recruited people for about 10 hours to get together, they ranged from the age of 18 to 50, and they were all very healthy and checked out ahead of time, initially they looked at having closer to 4000 people there, but they ended up only settling in about 1500 because I mean, hey, let's face it, you're basically putting yourself in a petri dish and becoming the actual experiment for Covid 19. And who wanted to do that back in August?
Right, so the first scenario, scenario number one was just a normal concert that you would have gone to all the time, very much prepandemic, no social distancing, everybody's just crammed in there real close to the stage watching the show. The second scenario that they tested was one where everyone was appropriately socially distanced, the third one they did was with seats, so they had people sit down, enjoy the concert and then leave potentially. The third one they did was simply just have everybody come down and sit in actual designated seats and then they left, so everybody in the audience was given very safe masks, they were also giving contact tracers so they could actually see where people were touching, etcetera, and they also used fog to sort of give an idea as how air flow was happening in the room, the findings were very interesting, and essentially it really comes down to how great the ventilation systems are in the venues, which is no surprise to me.
Delta has been doing this thing where they upgraded all of their ventilation systems to make sure that air is not being recycled, or if it is... It's being recycled in a way that's points you're a zero clean, so to speak. But the idea of the concert is basically the same, you have a great ventilation system, you have a really good chance of not wearing covid if you also wear a mask. A postconcert survey was done, and it said that up to about around 90% of the people who attended the concert said, I wouldn't mind wearing a mask to go watch a concert because... Hey, let's face it, I miss live music, where there is a will, there is a way, people... So what does this all mean? Does this mean that concerts just immediately come right back?
The truth is, most of the venues that I've ever been into have the worst ventilation systems ever, and the idea of a company being able or an independent theater or any sort of major moves from a major conglomerate like Live Nation, which just drop a bazillion dollars on new ventilation systems and mortgage that to the future, it seems a little unlikely to me, at least in the short term, I think that their probable play is to continue to do what they're doing right now, doing these outdoor concerts and trying to just show people that they care, and they want to bring live music back and doing that kind of stuff, but it does make you wonder if there was a sweeping move in selling ventilation systems across the country and all of these venues, both large and small, could we get back to work? Maybe I'm just simply happy that a study was done, that was done in a professional manner that now gives us data that we can look at and say that we can get together and do live concerts if these certain things are met.
And I think at this point, no matter whether you're a masker or anti-mask e or have any sort of agenda at all with this, I think everybody, at the end of the day is a music lover, and they would probably make the sacrifice of wearing a mask, just to show up and enjoy music again, and I know that musicians like myself and all my friends would love to also do that too.
Today's artist of the day is a band that is no longer in existence, so that's why it's really important that I talk about them. It is the band called Jungol and they are based right here where I'm at, from Atlanta, Georgia, and they are awesome, they were around many moons ago, the Yoder brothers did a really great job and putting together many, many albums of great music, but the album that I always keep going back to is this album called Places, and you should go and check that out, shout out to Graham, Josh, Jason and Zack, the whole crew. Sure, you miss hearing you guys.