Head Trip, Goldenvoice’s one-time-only dance festival on the Coachella grounds in Indio, California, ran on October 10 and 11 in front of a crowd Billboard puts at 90,000. For Apple Music, it was also something new: the first time the platform has livestreamed a complete festival on video, in any genre. A Billboard Pro report published on October 16 explains how, and why Apple chose to give it away.
Not gatekeeping
Festival livestreams are standard in dance music; Coachella, EDC Las Vegas and Ultra all stream. What Billboard identifies as different here was the distribution. Instead of keeping the stream on its own service, Apple Music broadcast it simultaneously on its YouTube, TikTok and Twitch accounts, with audio-only simulcasts on Apple Music 1, Apple Music Club, TuneIn and SiriusXM.
“We want the most amount of people around the world to experience this, so we’re not gatekeeping it,” Stephen Campbell, Apple Music’s global head of dance and electronic, told Billboard.
The on-demand plan splits the formats. Video of each performance is going up on the respective DJ’s own YouTube channel, while audio-only versions of the sets live exclusively on Apple Music. The Sunflower Soundsystem stage, the festival’s smaller club space curated by Floating Points, was not streamed but was recorded in spatial audio for release on Apple Music later.
The weekend did not go to plan. Lightning and the remnants of Tropical Storm Rachel ended Saturday’s programme early, cutting the livestream short too. Saturday headliner Calvin Harris, who could not play, moved to a Sunday bill that also included DJ Harvey, Peggy Gou, KETTAMA b2b Dom Dolla, Skrillex and Swedish House Mafia.
A stage designed for phones
The broadcast also shaped the stage. Romain Pissenem, whose company High Scream designed it, told Billboard that his presentation included renderings of how the stage would look in a phone’s portrait mode. “Doing a show for social media, for a livestream and for a live show is totally different,” he said. The result was an oblong structure roughly 100 feet tall and 330 feet long, made of reflective inflatable material, onto which each act’s production team layered its own visuals and lighting.
The bigger bet
For Apple, Head Trip was its biggest dance music offering since it launched Club Live, its live DJ mix strand, in May with a broadcast from EDC Las Vegas, according to Billboard. Campbell framed it as a deliberate commitment: “for us to put all of our creative investment, intellectual investment and financial investment into something like this, and for it to be dance music, it just makes a lot of sense.”
Goldenvoice senior vice president of talent Danny Bell described the festival as “a one-and-done show with the titans of a genre”, which the company felt “should be shared and captured”.
What we still don’t know
Billboard’s report contains no viewership figures, and Apple has not published any that BEZ has seen. Without them, it is impossible to say how far the free, multi-platform approach actually reached, or how it compares with the streams from EDC or Ultra. The model itself is the news: a streaming service acting as broadcaster, giving away the video to maximise reach and keeping the audio for its subscribers. For artists, it means their sets end up on their own channels; for fans, it means a festival they could not attend was a few taps away.
Watch for whether Apple shares audience numbers, and whether it uses the same approach for another festival.
