Grammy award-winning music composer
Ricky Kej has been busy hosting live concerts and coming up with new tracks, the most recent being the single,
Shine Your Light. In a video interview with us, Ricky spoke about the changing ethos of the music industry and the obstacles ahead for
musicians
, with everything going digital now...
Your recent digital concert Shine Your Light, had 44 musicians from six different countries on board. What was it like making that happen?This year, I was supposed to be performing at a concert in Washington DC on Earth Day (April 22). I decided to take things online and got these musicians on board. I'm really happy with the response. Congratulatory messages are still pouring in. It was nationally broadcast across several television channels. Worldwide, it was broadcast in over 70 countries. We’ve managed to reach around 90 million viewers across the world.
Will this be the way forward for musicians? If yes, what obstacles will they need to overcome first?While working on the Shine Your Light concert, I realised that there is no technology available yet, which would help musicians from different parts of the world perform together simultaneously, as a band. The only available options are either a deferred live or a recorded version. Musicians will now have to figure out how to monetize the situation, with these live concerts, virtual performances, or so on.
Virtual reality
is here to stay, so I’m sure we will figure out something.
Another obstacle is to come up with new material for every
virtual concert
. Since they will be published online, the content will be out there for everyone to see. Since these would be available online and re-watched by many, they'll become stale soon. I will not be able to perform the same set of songs over and over again. To keep the viewership active, I will have to churn out more new songs and musical content. The solution would be to find a way in which we geo-block concerts for a particular audience, say in a given country/city. But so far, there has been no available solution.
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