Travis Scott played to 12 million people in a video game
Fortnite's Astronomical event drew 12 million concurrent players. With every venue closed, a game became the biggest concert stage in the world.
Last Thursday Travis Scott performed inside Fortnite. Epic says 12.3 million players attended the first show at the same time, and more than 27 million unique players across the five showings over the weekend. For comparison, the largest real concerts have audiences in the hundreds of thousands.
I watched it with a colleague’s teenage son explaining things to me over video. It lasted about ten minutes. A giant Travis Scott walked across the island, the world transformed around the players with each song, everyone got launched into space and then underwater, and it ended with a new song premiere. It was closer to a theme park ride choreographed to music than a concert.
Every venue in the world is closed right now. Every tour is cancelled. Our own business, conference check-in, has basically gone to zero for the season, because there are no conferences. So I watched this partly as a music fan and partly as someone looking at what happens to live events when you can’t be in the same place.
A few things stood out.
It wasn’t a stream of a concert. People have been streaming concerts from living rooms for weeks, and they’re nice but flat. This was an event that could only happen in a virtual world, with the performer at a scale and in places that are physically impossible. It didn’t try to imitate being at a show.
The audience was already there. Epic didn’t need to sell 12 million tickets. Fortnite has a huge audience that logs in anyway, and the concert came to them. That’s the same distribution lesson I keep coming back to: build where people already are.
And you did things together. Everyone was flying, swimming and dancing in the same world at the same time, with friends in their squad. It wasn’t personal in the way a small club gig is, but it was shared, which a video on YouTube isn’t.
My guess is that when real venues reopen, they come back strong, because people miss them. But I don’t think virtual events go back to being a gimmick. The pandemic has forced a huge experiment in what can be done without physical presence, and for some things, like a spectacular one-off show for tens of millions, the virtual version is simply better.
For Amanda, the question is less exciting and more urgent. What is our technology good for when nobody is in a room? We have some ideas.