Benefit Concerts in the Modern World and the Economics of Suffering
Advisor: Brian Rappelfeld
Internship Location: The Common Good (Remote)
Onsite Mentor: Matthew Goldman, Owner
In contrast to other forms of philanthropy, benefit concerts occupy the niche of uniting communities to rally around victims of societal catastrophes through the universal language of music. In the past, benefit concerts like Live Aid have achieved great success, garnering public attention to crises like the 1983–1985 Ethiopian famine, but modern technology can assist concert organizers in fundraising. This research examines the most effective ways to use technology to improve benefit concerts and provide relief to suffering people, evaluating various stages like organizing, fundraising, and donating to identify areas for improvement in case studies for future application. Using mathematical simulations, this project will seek to determine the best practices for benefit concert organization at various scales to maximize fundraising. Then, by creating a benefit concert for the residents of Ellenville, NY, in collaboration with the event space and bookstore The Common Good, this research will put its findings to the test and provide a better understanding of the current state of organizing charity performances. In doing so, this project will explore how using different technologies, like social media streaming or promotion, can better raise awareness and funds for a good cause. As existential threats like climate change and pandemics become deadlier each passing day, it is unforeseeable that our society will run out of social issues or humanitarian crises to address. Research that seeks to make benefit concerts more effective and thereby alleviate as much human suffering as possible holds significant value in a world with so much turmoil.
Project Blog
Week 0: Introduction
Hello hello hello! My name is Gustavo Ponzoa, and I’ve been at BASIS since 5th grade. For my Senior Project, I wish to examine the most effective ways to use benefit concerts to provide relief to suffering peoples, evaluating various steps of the process of using benefit concerts as mechanisms for altruism such as organizing, fundraising, and donating to identify areas for improvement in case studies for future application. I chose a more musical topic because I essentially live my life with my headphones on. From listening to hours of music daily, to discussing music in articles in The Grizzly or in my Music Appreciation Club, to creating music by playing the electric guitar, music is far and away my life’s greatest joy. However, since humanitarian crises show no sign of slowing down, it’s clear that we need to address these issues and alleviate as much human suffering as possible. One option for doing so, the benefit concert, strikes a chord with me, as its powerful combination of music and philanthropy inspires me greatly to research how my love of music can help raise money and provide relief for those who need it most, like George Harrison’s Concert for Bangladesh and the 1985 Live Aid concerts did for victims of the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War and the 1983–1985 Ethiopian Famine respectively. For my analysis of benefit concerts in today’s era, I will connect with and interview relevant figures such as benefit concert organizers, music industry workers, and associated charities to better grasp how people organize charity performances in the modern day. Additionally, I plan to create a detailed report evaluating various findings from my qualitative analysis of data from those involved with benefit concerts with mathematical simulations in MATLAB. I don’t yet have an on-site placement, but I plan to involve myself in work regarding the use of technology to optimize promotion or coordination of a charity event, perhaps honing in on the translation of funds raised to good done. For more details regarding my Senior Project, read here.
Week 1: Benefit Concerts of All Sizes
Hello everyone,
A lot has happened in the last few weeks, a fact that was completely not reflected in my blog until now.
The main thing I spent Week 1 doing was looking for an on-site placement. While my project didn’t really hinge on a specific internship or organization, it was still of course crucial for me to have somewhere to work for. So, Mr. Rappelfeld and I created a rather diverse list of organizations, ranging from local foundations providing support to college students to foreign “effective altruism” groups researching ways to have high-impact careers and lead a more fulfilling life working on some of humanity’s biggest problems. I chose the groups I did because they had either been the beneficiaries of benefit concerts in the past, facilitated the concerts, or were organizations related to philanthropy and had some relevance to charity concerts. For example, the “effective altruism” groups could speak to the efficacy of organizing a benefit concert to raise funds for a cause like AI safety research or nuclear disarmament. Unfortunately, after Mr. Rappelfeld sent the emails out, we only got a quick response from one group 80,000 Hours, who said they were too small to help us with our project. The rest never came through, so it was back to the drawing board there.
In the meantime, I did some research to push the project forward. In the early stages of my Senior Project, I had primarily read about big names like Live Aid or Live 8 that had reached global audiences with megastar performers, which caught my interest. However, I realized that, for my project to be useful to all benefit concert organizers and not just the Bob Geldofs, I would need to also look at small and medium-sized performances, partly to see how the variable of size affected benefit concerts and their fundraising capacity for my later simulation but also to get a set of expectations for how shows were typically meant to go outside of the stunts of the most massive events with dozens of performers.
One show I looked at was called GAF LOS ANGELES. That’s not its real name, and I imagine you can figure out what GAF stands for, but it was what I’d call a medium-sized benefit concert in LA on February 5. The event was star-studded enough to catch my attention, even though it was eclipsed by the behemoth two-venue benefit concert FireAid. Hosted by comedian John C. Reilly, whose house burnt down in the fires, GAF LOS ANGELES had performers like Hayley Williams, FINNEAS, Fred Armisen, Jenny Lewis, Lucy Dacus, St. Vincent, and more. Additionally, the concert had a supplementary auction called “GIVE A FROCK LOS ANGELES” with items like the costume Chappell Roan wore in the music video “HOT TO GO!” That one sold for $88,900, making a huge impact by itself raising money for Los Angeles charities like One Voice.
However, I still wanted to know more about smaller, more modest charity shows, such as those put on by students on college campuses, to fully understand how different variables affected the concerts’ fundraising capacity. I also needed to better familiarize myself with the technical aspect of the task of simulating a benefit concert. By completing these in the next weeks, I would be prepared to tackle the hardest parts of the project towards the end. That’s all I have for now, though. Goodbye!
Weeks 2-3: Promotional Tactics
Hi all,
This entry will cover weeks 2 and 3, which were really rather similar since enough of the details of the project overall were still up in the air (like where my placement might be) such that there wasn’t much more to do than research more. Specifically, I wanted to do more digging for both “successful” benefit concerts that I had overlooked as well as smaller-scale productions and promotion campaigns that might be more applicable to everyday organizers.
The first source in the two-week period was called “Promoting a Benefit Concert with Digital Media” by Aubrea Felch. Felch wrote the paper as a student at California Polytechnic State University who, alongside a group of friends, hosted an on-campus benefit concert called Love Out Loud aimed at raising awareness for depression, suicide, and self-harm, especially among young adults and college students. Proceeds went to the non-profit To Write Love On Her Arms. Felch’s research asked how the use of digital media could effectively promote and “enhance” the concert, much in line with my research on technology’s effects on benefit concert “success.” In her paper, she outlines the myriad ways the organizer team promoted the event, including a Facebook page, a website, a blog, a Twitter account, several YouTube videos, a Flickr account, posters, a photo booth, and merch. It was clear to me that some of these methods were a product of their time (early 2011), since I had never heard of people my age using Flickr albums to promote anything ever, and Facebook is generally less popular than other apps like Instagram for young adults nowadays. However, the research was detailed, and the research included multiple surveys of the concert’s attendees to determine how they found out about the concert.
For one, it seems as if simply knowing the organizers was a big factor for part of the audience attending the show, as 47% of the respondents said it was how they first heard about the show. Student clubs and word of mouth were also important, together representing another 26% of respondents. Facebook was also a decently-popular response, whereas other means like posters, department announcements, or the school newspaper seemed to be less important as ways to raise awareness for the concert itself. Of course, a lot of the event’s promotion was specific to its collegiate nature, but 44% of respondents said they were not Cal Poly students, showing that the event was able to make waves outside of its immediate surroundings and represent something larger than just another campus event.
The paper had a much more detailed analysis of website data and traffic, Facebook likes over time, and what kinds of people they were reaching. A good summary, however, is that the combined use of different forms of digital media like a social media page to hook viewers, a website to inform them, and promotional videos to create a lasting memory for the audience effectively spread the message behind the Love Out Loud concert to create a successful show. Other forms were less effective, like selling coffee sleeves or other weird memorabilia, but the main three I mentioned above and the fact that they linked to each other got the organizers the most mileage in promoting and “enhancing” their benefit concert.
Another source I read was Chapter 3 of Joel R. Pruce’s book The Mass Appeal of Human Rights, titled “Benefit Concerts, Constituencies of Compassion, and the Culture Industry.” This was a more academic look at how the culture of mass consumerism that has characterized Western society after WW2 has affected how benefit concerts play a role in modern life, specifically one that is convenient and marketized.
It talked a fair amount about 80s charity music such as USA for Africa’s “We Are The World” single and the string of concerts called Live Aid, but one thing that I hadn’t thought of was the benefit concerts put on by the then-rapidly growing Amnesty International. Specifically, I’m referring to the event called The Secret Policeman’s Ball, which began as the comedy show “A Poke in the Eye (With a Sharp Stick)” featuring both Monty Python and Beyond the Fringe, two famous British comedy troupes. The first show in 1976 raised $40,000, and the event became more prominent year after year, adding composer John Williams and guitarist of the Who Pete Townshend by the third annual show. They were able to raise much more money for Amnesty International by including these big names; for example, the 1981 show featured musicians such as Sting, Eric Clapton, Phil Collins, and a certain Bob Geldof, who would go on to get together both Band Aid and Live Aid.
In essence, the Secret Policeman’s Ball series kicked off the whole trend of humanitarian benefit concerts that would follow in the ‘80s, including the later Amnesty International concerts called the Conspiracy of Hope tour that raised not money but awareness for human rights issues, culminating in letter writing campaigns for high-profile political prisoners around the world. I don’t do the chapter justice by briefly summarizing it in this way, and it speaks much more about what it all means for a concert to raise money for the suffering people of a far-away land in the age of credit cards and yuppies, but the chapter opened my eyes to more examples of how concerts can be a way to promote a cause or an NGO itself. Amnesty International, for one, grew from several thousand members in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s to being a household name in large part thanks to the many concerts it put on for human rights. So while most organizers won’t exactly be inviting Sting or Bono to a benefit concert, Amnesty International’s concerts show the many horizons for the promotional mechanism.
The other big consideration I had besides research was the internship placement, and still we hadn’t gotten responses from the places we reached out to. So, after speaking with Ms. Goldfarb, we decided to reach out to one more contact, who I’ll save for Week 4. Bye for now!
Week 4: A Major Update
Hi all,
When I was struggling to get an on-site placement, Ms. Goldfarb had one idea for a contact. He had extensive music industry experience from his younger days, meaning he knew something about concert organization. He owned his own event space, where he’d held musical performances in the past. And, Ms. Goldfarb added, he’d love to help out again, as she thought he was feeling some nostalgia for BASIS and wanted to engage in the community somehow. I’m talking about Mr. Goldman, who currently owns the bookstore and bar The Common Good in Ellenville, NY. We thought he’d be a perfect fit as an on-site mentor, so she connected us, and we set up a time to meet for Tuesday the 22nd.
The project for us to work on together will be a real benefit concert. We were going to have a lot of details to figure out at the meeting, because we didn’t know when it’d be or what the concert would be about. I didn’t have any personal experience hosting such an event, either. However, I knew that it’d be a fitting end to this project, where I could apply what I’ve learned from my research to a real concert raising money for a good cause. Of course, I wasn’t expecting this when I first set out what I was going to do each week of the project, so I’ve needed to rethink my planning.
In the meantime, a lot was going on in my personal life. I was on a trip to Evanston, IL to tour Northwestern’s campus and attend an admitted students’ day for the beginning of this week, which meant I struggled to get work done, as I was mostly exhausted by the day’s activities whenever I had time. I also got sick towards the end of the week, and I was too fatigued to stay awake and get work done.
So, instead of trying to do that, I’ve rescheduled the coming weeks around the concert. I had planned to survey groups like concert venues, music industry figures/concert organizers, and charities on the efficacy of benefit concerts, but I realize now that I could gain the relevant experience actually on the job, perhaps reaching out to some of the above for advice rather than for a pie chart. The benefit concert simulation will have to happen soon, since the concert planning is going to start shortly, and it’s possible that I won’t be cleanly finished with my results and conclusions before Mr. Goldman and I start making the major decisions for the concert (such as who to have perform) that may depend on the conclusions, but that’s not a dealbreaker.
I’m super excited to work with Mr. Goldman as my on-site mentor and to meet with him more regularly, either digitally or occasionally in-person! That’s all for now.
Week 5: Initial Plans
Hi everybody,
This week, I had my virtual meeting with Mr. Goldman. He looks more country than I remember, wearing a trucker hat with BBQ written on it. The meeting went super well though, and we talked about a lot. First, I shared with him how this project came about and my interest in pursuing it. Though I mentioned names like George Harrison’s Concert for Bangladesh or Live Aid, I aimed to make clear that I believed benefit concerts of all sizes could have an impact on their local community. I have never been to Ellenville, so I was relying on Mr. Goldman’s insight here to share what he thought mattered to the people of the town.
Apparently, events went on almost all the time in Ellenville, or at least everybody knows about the ones that do happen. I asked him if he knew some local performers for the event, and he mentioned to me the name of a comedian who had performed at the Borscht Belt Museum across from his place, Alejandro Morales. Remembering the success of the benefit concert GAF LOS ANGELES and how it featured several comedians, I thought it was a great idea to have more than just bands perform.
As for the main focus of the concert, Mr. Goldman told me about one person he had met at one event, whose daughter was suffering from a rare form of cancer. She’s my age, but she had lost all her hair from the chemotherapy she was undergoing. Her story is in the local paper, called the Shawangunk Journal after the nearby mountain range. Of course, Mr. Goldman still needed to ask her family if they were alright with being the beneficiaries. The news article said that they could afford most of her treatment, but further donations were still highly appreciated. She additionally hopes to attend SUNY Stony Brook in the fall if all goes well, and that isn’t free either.
We also needed to pick a date to host a concert. Since it’s a multi-purpose event space, Mr. Goldman remarked that several ideal dates and times had already been booked. However, Sunday, June 1st and Thursday, June 5th both had available times for a 2-hour-and-change benefit concert, so it’s likely that either one of those will be the date of the event. He gave me a brief tour of the space, which was a really cozy looking bookstore with a somewhat modern pub-style bar in the back. There was a quarter-circle stage on one side that looked somewhat small but able to fit one person and a microphone. For bands that would likely take up more space than that, we could probably clear the bookshelves to make the room. They would likely be moved regardless so that people could sit, but we can make these adjustments as we see fit.
Additionally, Mr. Goldman wanted me to see Ellenville at least two times before the concert so that I could have a more memorable experience. It’s about two and a half hours away from here, which isn’t easy, but it would be strange for me to have a benefit concert for a town I’d never been to before. I still need to talk with my parents about the logistics of visiting Ellenville, however. I’d also like as many people as possible to come to the concert from BASIS, but we’ll see how realistic that is.
For now, I’ll finish reading about case studies to create a list of best practices for benefit concerts small and large and a plan for how to organize this specific concert. I rescheduled a meeting with Mr. Goldman for this coming Tuesday, so we’ll have time to talk about more specifics. I’ll also be working on the preparation for the benefit concert simulation so that I don’t run out of time by the end of the event. That’s all for now, goodbye!
Week 6: Concert Pricing 101
Hello everyone!
This past week, I primarily made more plans with my remote supervisor Mr. Goldman. For one, we opted to push back the date of the benefit concert to June 8th, the Sunday after prom because something arose on his end. We also confirmed with the family of the Ellenville high schooler that she could be the beneficiary of this charity concert. They were more than grateful, and it warmed my heart to hear how tight-knit the Ellenville community is. As for some logistics, we discussed how we were looking to maximize fundraising in a number of ways. Mr. Goldman acknowledged that, as a charity event, we were unable to pay our show’s performers. However, given that The Common Good doubles as a bar, he offered to give free food and drinks to our acts.
He also suggested that the food and drinks of the bar could provide a sizable portion of the overall funds collected. While most of the proceeds earned this way will go to The Common Good’s expenses—it is a business, after all—a cut of the bar’s revenue will contribute to the concert’s mission. However, for people to spend money at the bar, they have to first purchase tickets. If the tickets are too expensive, then of course fewer people will attend. Yet while the decrease in revenue resulting from fewer attendees may be offset in some scenarios by the increased ticket prices, adopting more costly prices for our tickets also prevents people from buying food or drinks from the bar. Accordingly, we decided to err on the cheaper side for our ticket prices. We spit out some numbers like twelve or fifteen dollars, but we haven’t made a decision here yet, nor do we have any statistics indicating what prices at which Ellenville consumers are willing to buy tickets that might inform our choice.
If we were to have such data, it would only require high school math to create a graph demonstrating the relationship between ticket price and total revenue, which would resemble an upside-down U. The shape of this U largely depends on the relationship between ticket price and the number of consumers willing to buy a ticket at that price; multiply them, and you get your revenue U. The Laffer/napkin curve in economics showing the relationship between tax rate and tax revenue resembles an upside-down U for largely the same reasons, indicating that there exists a sweet spot that optimizes for maximum revenue in the tradeoff between ticket price/taxed income and ticket buyers/taxpayers.
This relationship between ticket price and willing consumers is often of the form y=a(x^n)+b, where y is the number of willing consumers, a is a negative constant reflecting the elasticity of demand, x is the ticket price, n is a positive constant signifying the degree of the relationship (linear, quadratic, etc.), and b is a positive constant reflecting the total number of consumers, i.e. everyone who would attend if tickets were free. While sometimes it makes sense to make the simplifying assumption that n=1, meaning there is a linear relationship between price and demand, this doesn’t always reflect real-world consumers. For example, a linear relationship would mean that a portion of consumers who are willing to buy a $1 ticket are unwilling to buy a $2 ticket, and that the amount of consumers who feel this way stays the exact same between all single-dollar price jumps as shown in image 1. Realistically, however, a smaller amount of people are turned off by marginal price increases for super cheap tickets, and a larger amount of people are turned off by marginal price increases for super expensive tickets, as shown in image 2 (though an argument can be made that, to the super rich, $500 and $501 are effectively equal, see image 3).
Where the math gets more complex is when we account for additional ways of generating revenue besides tickets, such as merchandise or food, and when we move past revenue and hone in on what really matters—profit. To find profit means to find expenses, and that can change based on a number of choices like what venue to book or how much to pay concert staff. Additionally, we’ve so far assumed that tickets can only have one price, when often ticket prices vary by the quality of seats, the time at which the ticket is bought, or even the customer in question. Many other businesses like those in the airline industry implement dynamic pricing models to maximize revenue by, for example, charging consumers from higher-income cities more than those from lower-income cities.
For our benefit concert, very little of this matters. It’s likely that we may pick a ticket price suggested from the literature of past concerts of a small scale, rather than do calculations. While we do have the nuance of providing food and drinks, we won’t need to employ price discrimination to eke out every last penny. However, many other concert organizers will need to factor in these nuances, and the purpose of this Senior Project is to be useful to concert organizers of all types and levels of ambition. Therefore, in the coming weeks I will aim to run benefit concert simulations using a programming language such as Python or MATLAB to not only cover our specific, simple case but also concerts of many different varieties. While the revenue optimization strategies discussed above have been covered by many different research papers, I predict that it will be the analysis of expenses, like which musicians to book based on their price and popularity, that will be the most specific to concert organization and the most original. However, next week’s blog post will go into more detail regarding simulations.
The rest of my conversation with Mr. Goldman centered on research into case studies of benefit concerts and the academic discourse surrounding the topic. He took a liking to the quote by Bob Geldof, organizer of Live Aid, that the world needed a “populist, non-governmental constituency of compassion.” By animating those attending a benefit concert to care more about a particular issue, people working to fix the issue get not just attention but support. Benefit concerts create a personal stake in the hearts of attendees, even if the crisis is located on another continent. The issue needn’t be new or relatively unknown either—some of the most universally-acknowledged problems that have no clear solution like hunger or cancer still benefit from charity shows due to their severity. Even if everybody in the audience already knew Los Angeles was burning in January, the creation of FireAid allowed for attendees (whose homes perhaps weren’t affected by the fires) to have an experience they’ll never forget reminding them of the devastation of wildfires. With FireAid, the constituency of compassion both expanded to include those not affected by the fires and strengthened itself, evolving from a passive awareness that fire can be very hot to a more active attention being given to wildfires and those suffering from its effects.
Our concert centers on a young person with cancer. Everybody in the audience will already know what cancer is and will likely have known someone with cancer. Yet, when there already exists great and widespread awareness of an issue, compassion is what matters most. Perhaps very few in the audience will be suddenly motivated to go to medical school to try to work on a cure for cancer, but after the show cancer will hopefully mean *more* to the audience. It already means quite a lot, being the existentially deadly disease that it is, but the goal is that attendees pay more attention to cancer research or how its funding is being cut around the country. We hope that the student’s specific, rare cancer is better understood by more people, yet we wish that people afflicted with other types of cancers in completely different parts of the body get more compassion too. In essence, we hope to bring more members of the community of Ellenville into the worldwide constituency of compassion for cancer victims, such that even years after our show, attendees will still have that spark to support cancer’s eradication, rather than merely wish for it.
Next week, I will aim to provide more deliverables such as draft flyer designs or names of acts contacted, as well as discuss my progress with simulating a benefit concert. That’s all for now though. See you next week.
Week 7: The Virtual Concert Question
Hi everybody,
In the Week 6 blog, I mostly discussed the basics of the math behind concert pricing. This week focuses mostly on research, but has implications for the focus of the simulation as well. I also have some upcoming plans which hopefully should be interesting to you all.
On the research side, the most important development was that I was given access to my college email this week, letting me unlock many articles I’d been eyeing for a while and leading me to new sources I’d overlooked. For example, a 1986 report by the Irish NGO Trócaire, which focuses on humanitarian aid and development programs, assessed the contemporary influence the spectacle Live Aid had on the public’s perception of global development issues. Challenging traditional approaches to development work, the report argued, Live Aid successfully fueled debates about how the government and other actors were handling development education and humanitarian aid programs, even though it was too early then to comprehensively evaluate the lasting impact of Live Aid on the world. It also detailed how many tons of dried skim milk powder—among other items—the organizers of Live Aid delivered using the proceeds of the Band Aid single, “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” The answer is 1240, if you were curious.
Providing not only great trivia but also an account from the perspective of an NGO involved in development programs, the paper made me realize the extent to which Live Aid had affected not just Ethiopia, but the developed world as well. While it’s nothing new that a benefit concert will provoke audience members to care more about the issue that the concert addresses, Trócaire’s article revealed that NGOs also had a lot of lessons to learn after Live Aid demonstrated the power of using benefit concerts to raise money and awareness for development issues, emphasizing the importance of communication between these NGOs and the general public. For instance, it acknowledged that the organization had seldom asked the public about the issues it deemed important. Further, Trócaire’s article claimed that development NGOs had largely ignored popular culture, instead opting to disseminate information to the public through lectures and seminars, dropping papers and reports from the ivory tower. However, Live Aid highlighted the power of popular culture, which was already a mainstay of activism regarding apartheid and disarmament, in effecting social change. Essentially, development agencies needed to get with the times brought about by Live Aid.
Certainly, campaigning to raise awareness for issues around the world is now deeply embedded within popular culture, from celebrities championing the #MeToo movement to the omnipresence of political issues on social media platforms. The blending of popular culture and sociopolitical activism embodied by Live Aid has only grown more prominent since the ‘80s. Indeed, this project was born from my curiosity as to how development NGOs have embraced this new cultural climate, and how the rise of benefit concerts marked a shift in strategy from humanitarian aid agencies. However, with the rise of new technologies, the relief and development sector is bound to face new challenges from which to learn. My research in this regard seeks to apply these new realities or lessons to benefit concerts, as they promise to remain an enduring mechanism for fundraising and promoting awareness of global development issues. Perhaps the pivotal event to raise these challenges as Live Aid did is yet to come, perhaps it may well have arrived already. The point is, the world is changing, and those involved in the development sector must react quickly to seize new opportunities for making the world a better place.
Other research articles focused on the economics of live music, both traditionally and in the modern era. One Medium article even discussed a topic I hadn’t considered before, that being the virtual concert. While the digitalization of music from physical records to buttons on Spotify had crossed my mind many times as a driving force behind the current state of music, leaving many implications to consider when comparing a modern benefit concert to those 40 years ago, I hadn’t realized that live music may undergo a similar digitalization in the next few years as well. Many prominent artists already have hosted virtual concerts, especially during the pandemic: Travis Scott held a virtual concert on Fortnite attended by over 12 million people, the Weeknd held one on TikTok, Charli XCX held a DJ set on Grindr, and Lady Gaga “curated” a benefit concert called “One World: Together At Home” for COVID-19 relief. Even before the pandemic, K-pop artists have been holding virtual concerts ever since a 2013 event featuring Psy’s “Gangnam Style” gained popularity. Meanwhile, bands like Gorillaz have been “virtually” performing for years, projecting the band’s cartoon members onto screens while obscuring the human musicians, a choice that lends itself easily to a truly virtual live music experience. And, as AI influencers are on the rise, “they” too may flourish in a space where virtual performances are the norm.
As with all major shifts, there’s a lot to unpack. The most obvious criticism is that people seek out live music specifically to experience something more tangible and human than Apple Music can offer them. Live music sounds good and often better than recorded music, not to mention the human connection felt by seeing your favorite artist in person and the memories made of singing along with crowds of strangers. Virtual concerts cannot offer everything that live concerts can. However, hosting a concert virtually does create some positive externalities, as it provides an equitable experience for everyone in attendance. Concert tickets are no longer restricted to those who can cough up the most money or have the best internet for lightning-quick ticket purchases—everyone who wants to attend can, as long as they can access the virtual concert. Moreover, there are no carbon emissions from thousands of people traveling to and from the concert, energy costs from powering the stadium, or excess materials thrown out or not used during the concert. So while the idea of a virtual concert sounds bizarre, it’s highly plausible that the medium becomes more popular as we become an increasingly online society. However, the fundraising capabilities of virtual concerts likely needs further analysis.
Again, I’m giving the obligatory disclaimer that this doesn’t particularly apply to the Ellenville concert. I will not be hosting a Fortnite concert or a Grindr DJ set, even though I know you’d all show up if I did. However, to comprehensively assess the feasibility of different benefit concert design choices in the modern era, it’s impossible to look past the changes to the live music industry that modern technology promises to provide, however strange they seem now. To this end, I hope to explore the difference between virtual and live concerts as one of the main focuses of the simulation. Analyzing how the ability to fundraise differs from one concert medium to another may become increasingly relevant as virtual concerts perhaps inevitably see more widespread use.
That was a lot, so I’ll quickly summarize my upcoming plans. I will be traveling to meet Mr. Goldman in Ellenville Tuesday, May 20th so I can do planning at the site of the concert. Week 8 is when I have two AP exams, which will likely derail my plans somewhat. The blog entry should ideally cover the specifics of the benefit concert simulation process and the research informing my choices there. The end date of the Senior Project is also slowly approaching, so I will have to start creating my presentation and other deliverables, so next week’s blog may delve into that further. Till then, that’s all I’ve got. See you next week.
Week 8: Mega-Events and (De)Politicization
Hi all,
Throughout the research process, I’ve said a lot of what’s on my mind for the project, and I’ve hinted at what piques my interest, but I figured I should be as clear as possible here regarding the econometrics at play and the factors to look out for in determining how to produce long-term success with a benefit concert.
There are many different ways to measure the economic activity of a concert. Lots of research has been done on how much concerts benefit local economies by attracting concertgoers using economic impact analysis. This application of econometrics relies on data such as monthly taxable retail sales, concertgoer county of residence, and attendee counts to determine a relationship between the flow of people induced by concerts and the flow of money. There are a few wrinkles, however. Of course, many concert attendees will live in the same location as a concert, and so the concert itself likely did not cause these concertgoers to spend money around the area. A resident would have bought food regardless of if they had tickets to the concert, for example. Additionally, the mass migration of people traveling to large concerts can have a counterbalancing chilling effect, as the traffic or crowding indirectly caused by the concert’s existence discourages non-concertgoers from spending money in a particular area. It’s also worth noting that not all contributions to the local economy are uniform. People who have to drive long distances to get to a concert that ends late at night will likely stay at a hotel, but most attendees may not.
Yet, from the start I wanted to look at something that I see as a little bit deeper, how cash translates into good done. A few blog posts ago, I looked at elementary models for determining maximum ticket revenue. As for expenses, it largely consists of flat costs, such as booking the event space, compensating the performers, hiring staff, or creating merchandise. This isn’t anything new, though. What value I hope to get from this Senior Project lies in the largely technological differences between concert organization now and concert organization 40 years ago. We live in a much more globalized world with targeted digital advertising and social media campaigns bringing more awareness of everything to everyone, for better or worse. Some rejoice at this new “global meritocracy of suffering,” where every cause that proves itself to be deserving eventually gets attention. Others see attention as a finite resource for which causes must compete to get the aid they need. In any case, huge spectacles can guide public attention as Live Aid did, giving great power to the organizers. It also gives them a big question to answer: “should we be political?”
Most commonly, the organizers of mega-events try their absolute hardest to say “no.” Politics, in the eyes of political scientist Chantal Mouffe, inherently involves conflict, especially resistance to predominant power structures. Mega-events, being big-tent events intended to attract as many attendees as possible—and turn away as few people as they can—thus aim to ignore politics to avoid causing controversy. Even when politics eventually gets its way and rears its head, mega-event organizers have chosen not to take a stance. During the 1972 Olympic Games, when 11 Israeli citizens were killed by Palestinian terrorists in what is now known as the Munich Massacre, then-president of the International Olympic Committee Avery Brundage famously refused to end or postpone the Olympics. “The games must go on,” he declared, and after just one day games proceeded as usual. This itself sparked controversy, of course, as neutrality is itself a political stance to which one may take offense. Yet, while avoiding politics may gain the organizers of mega-events some detractors, diving headfirst into the messy conflicts characterizing the world’s state of affairs usually makes more people disagree with one’s position. Thus, however ridiculous statements like “sports transcend politics” or “music is apolitical” may be, they nonetheless serve as mantras for your World Cups or Live Aids.
I say ridiculous because any aspect of life as major and universal as sports or music is ripe for political opportunities. In the case of large organizations or mega-events whose audiences reach around the world, the unification of peoples from all different continents inherently contributes to the political economy of globalization. FIFA has more member nations than the UN, requiring professional infrastructure and collaboration that hardly remains tied to the youthful notion of kicking balls into goals. In order to accomplish this Herculean task of organizing the World Cup every four years, FIFA nominally adopts a neutral, depoliticized stance, and yet each member state’s participation in the World Cup reflects a political choice to be a part of the global sporting community and the global sporting business.
On the other hand, nationalist sentiments flourish in competitive environments. Though it is true that music and sports can create communities comprising different nationalities and cultures as a result of their universal nature, they also serve to craft national images and cultures for governments to project. Music and sports, as cultural and even ethnolinguistic exports, are prime examples of ways governments exert influence by showing off their proudest achievements. As these exports compete in a global market, heads clash and tensions arise. Though the Olympics are competitions between athletes as opposed to countries, athletes must indeed be subjects of their respective country. Additionally, the disparity in resources that countries can offer their teams doubtless affects their national team’s performance at the elite level. You will also never see Ukraine and Russia paired against each other by the organizers in the initial stages of a sports tournament, as such a meeting abounds with underlying political hostility. In effect, the game of making a mega-event apolitical consists not of refraining from taking a political stance, but rather balancing the already-prominent nationalist and globalist forces at play.
To avoid making this blog post too long, I will continue this topic in my Week 9 blog post, where I will also cover my trip to Ellenville, centering on the decisions Mr. Goldman and I make for hosting the benefit concert as well as all the underlying logistics. Additionally, I’ll provide updates about the research and the preparation of the final presentation and any deliverables. Till then, that’s all. See you next time.
Week 9: Visiting Ellenville
Hi all,
This blog post consists of two sections. The first will directly continue from the topic discussed in my last blog post, and the second will discuss my trip to Ellenville in which I visited Mr. Goldman and The Common Good, among other topics.
Returning to the discourse surrounding whether to politicize mega-events, the apolitical pretense maintained by mega-event organizers often persists even when the organizers want to capture the spirit of politics. Mega-events like Live Aid are made to be apolitical despite the illusion that the concert is taking a stance against social issues relevant to politics like poverty and hunger. You’ll notice that, in the imagery and messaging, you never see the military airplanes bombing the crop fields of Ethiopia, but rather the devastation afterwards, as if nature caused the famine. You’ll never see starving men, as they’re mostly all off fighting. You’ll never see the child soldier wielding a Kalashnikov, but rather the hungry baby who exists not as a political subject but as a living creature, capable of suffering but not advocating. Depictions of human suffering focus on zoë, in the words of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, or the “bare life,” the fact that the organism is biologically alive. This is in contrast to bios, the “political life,” or the way in which one lives their life and uses agency to make choices, some of which may conflict with others. Zoë sparks compassion and donations for the innocent victim, whereas bios reflects ugly truths that obscure narratives, such as which side is “good” and which is “bad.” Suddenly, donating to do the right thing becomes less convenient, as what the “right thing” is becomes unclear.
Organizers cannot have this, of course. It simply wouldn’t do to host Live Aid and tell the audience of 1.5 billion people to make up their minds about which side in the Ethiopian civil war they wish to support. Perhaps most of them did not know such a war was occurring. In any case, there must be a clear story to tell with clear victims, and yet at the same time no mention of the politics responsible for their victimhoods. The donations roll in, aimed towards providing food to the starving people, and yet nothing is done about the war. The savior complex lives another day, narratives of helplessness grow stronger, and the public is satisfied with having empathized with a far-away individual through a computer transaction. The status quo remains, and in due time another similarly-fashioned concert comes along, likely without changing much.
Well, that was bleak. So how does this relate to my research?
There are many changes to request of concert organizers, all in effect “to do better.” One could ask, “what if we try to make a truly political concert? Will that fail disastrously, or will that do something? How might that backfire?” We could ask, “how does the anonymity of a country, its culture, and its political climate in the eyes of Western audiences relate to the success of a zoë-infused narrative of victimhood? To funds raised?” “How does the use of technology in organizing a benefit concert relate to its propensity for political activism?” More broadly, “what does a truly political concert look like? What examples have there been?”
Most people don’t *want* more politics in everyday life. It’s hard, it’s discouraging, it’s corrupt, and it’s of course divisive. I don’t want to advocate for a particular cause even in this Senior Project for the same reason. Part of why we picked “a girl’s cancer treatment” as the subject of our upcoming benefit concert is because it’s not controversial. I have no idea who I would have supported in the Ethiopian civil war. Yet it’s fairly evident that most of the issues plaguing humanity are self-inflicted. We created wars, poverty, famine, and nuclear weapons; we exacerbate environmental disasters; and we are ultimately responsible for how much funding we allocate towards medical research. We may not be able to write a letter to cancer asking it to resign, we can care about the battle against cancer and the forces involved. This particular area is the compassion for which Mr. Goldman and I hope to build our constituency with our concert, but the sky’s the limit.
Our concert is Sunday, June 8th, by the way, so don’t miss it! Attendance is free, but we do have a suggested donation of around $12. You can ask me for more details, but we’d love it if you could come.
So now, what’s this all got to do with econometrics, variables, or simulations? Of course, we are interested in factors like price and demand. However, there are some more abstract forces to analyze, like appeal strength, publicity, or access. There are the public’s political sentiments or leanings on certain issues that have supporting data, and then there are details that may not be quantifiable like, “to what degree should one cooperate with government agencies and development NGOs?” There are also, of course, different ways to support a cause, whether that’s buying short-term relief like food supplies or channeling money into grassroots educational programs to increase long-term prospects and quality of life.
Applying this research means finding relationships between these variables, or likely using regression analysis to extract meaning from factors like total funds raised, total attendance, popularity of issue, promotional techniques, use of technology, and performer publicity. From this work, I can only hope to derive insights that may inform answers to the more abstract questions behind this project, and bundle them all up for you in a presentation. The literature can give backing to ideas like, “mega-events that fail to inspire political action fall short of challenging the status quo,” but my research must ask, “by how much?”
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When I first heard that Mr. Goldman lived in the town of Ellenville, NY, a solid 100 miles away from the city, I was rather excited to see just how different it'd look from my usual surroundings. The only real obstacle was getting to and from the town on the 20th, a Tuesday morning, during which Mr. Goldman closes the “shop” but still tends to business matters. I graciously received an excused absence and, wary of the different and frankly unexciting bus routes to Ellenville, bought Amtrak tickets to Poughkeepsie, where Mr. Goldman thankfully was able to meet me. I left the house at 6:30 in the morning and arrived at the station at 8:45, after which we had a drive lasting a little under an hour to get to Ellenville, stopping by a Walmart on the way to pick up supplies for The Common Good’s kitchen.
We got to The Common Good at around 10 AM, and it’s rather gorgeous in-person. It’s very carefully put-together, and the quarter-circle stage that our performers will eventually use was thankfully larger than it had seemed in our Google Meets. Mr. Goldman was quite shaken by the state of the children’s section, as it appears Ellenville toddlers had not yet grasped the importance of alphabetical sortation. Nonetheless, we sat down, and I began working on a flyer draft to be shown physically around Ellenville and on social media platforms such as Facebook. We briefly spoke about using other platforms such as Instagram or TikTok, but we dismissed the idea, as Mr. Goldman had seen little benefit from promoting The Common Good on the apps before, and the emphasis on short-form content makes Instagram or TikTok less useful for conveying information compared to a Facebook post. We also figured Facebook would reach older audiences, as apparently everyone in Ellenville over 45 uses Facebook.
After some time I finished the flyer draft, using a somewhat sleek black-and-white design with a gold accent, as the gold/yellow ribbon symbolizes sarcomas, the specific category of cancer in question. We then had Mexican for lunch and toured Ellenville somewhat more, seeing historical buildings like where the women’s temperance society had its headquarters in the 19th century. In the city charter, according to Mr. Goldman, it is illegal for alcohol to be present in that building to this day. Despite this, he told me some teens drink there nowadays, though we were unable to determine whether this was a deliberate act of civil disobedience or an ironic coincidence.
As I was leaving, I wanted to thank him and purchase a book, leading him to present me with several interesting collections of essays in musical journalism. The one I ended up choosing, he told me, looked at the New Jersey punk and emo scene through the eyes of a Muslim American, though it was his fiercely-asserted admiration for the book’s writing that led me to pick it more than anything else. As we entered the car, I looked a little closer and saw Lucy Dacus' praise on the back cover. On the way to the station, we played different kinds of music ranging from my beloved Wolf Alice, to the Stone Roses and Primal Scream, to some solo indie artists like Julia Jacklin, whose music he said he enjoyed but admitted that one of his colleagues would label it “whingy.”
I got home safely after a 30-minute delay having gotten a feel for the town, discussed various logistics, and created a draft flyer for Mr. Goldman to edit and post in the coming days. It was somewhat exhausting, and it was the first time I had ever traveled on Amtrak alone, but even though I nearly missed my stop, I got a lot of good memories out of the whole experience. I’m excited to visit again on the 8th.
Of course, I took many photos that day. Here are some highlights:
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This is all that I had room for in this blog. To quickly summarize everything else going on, Mr. Rappelfeld and I agreed to have the presentation rehearsal on Tuesday the 10th, meaning I’ll have to quickly update the slides to include all the takeaways from the concert itself. We’ll see how that goes. The Week 10 blog post will aim to supply the data behind benefit concerts and analyze the relationships between these variables as mentioned in the first part of this blog. Additionally, it will show my progress on the Senior Project presentation and hopefully wrap up any loose ends from the past few months of blogging. Until then, that’s all I’ve got. See you later.
Week 10: The Concert
Hi all,
This week, I had the opportunity to see my dreams realized in the form of a benefit concert in Ellenville, NY. On Sunday, June 8th, my family and I trekked up (well, rented a car and drove up, anyway) to the town and caught brunch at a shop Mr. Goldman had recommended. Coincidentally, he and his family were already there. We walked on over to The Common Good and I helped him set up, putting up QR codes for people to scan and donate to Isabella’s treatment. I got a paper cut in the bathroom, somehow, but that couldn’t keep the smile off my face. Eventually, the performers rolled up, along with others who mostly hovered around the bar.
The performers perhaps couldn’t be any more different—the host/comedian, Alejandro Morales, was a gay man from a Hispanic immigrant family. Meanwhile, the second performer, the singer/songwriter Amanda Jerry, played a variety of songs on her acoustic guitar, ranging from Phoebe Bridgers to the Beatles. She also played some songs Isabella had sent her. Apparently, she is quite the Swiftie. Last but not least, the trio Chill Sounds played a variety of older songs (though perhaps that descriptor doesn’t apply to their cover of “Losing My Religion”). The main singer had a very deep speaking voice. My mom didn’t think he could be the lead vocalist, and yet he was, and he pulled it off super well. The drummer wasn’t able to fit his drumset on the whole stage, so he brought a smaller drum machine. At first, it was somewhat noticeable, but after a while it blended in quite well with the rest of the music.
After the event, I scrambled to survey people to see why they came. I asked general demographics questions, as well as questions regarding if they knew Isabella beforehand or how they found out about the concert in the first place. To my surprise, most people I surveyed had not heard of Isabella before learning about the concert, and yet showed up anyway. However, as I reflect on it, this may not be all that surprising after all. Most people who are able to come to a concert have not experienced the tragedy that the concert is centered around, yet are able to comprehend and empathize with the suffering of those who have. Cancer is no stranger, and one does not need to know Isabella to wish her well as a fellow human being.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to survey more than 10 or so people of the roughly 30 that I saw at any given moment. People sometimes trickled in and out, depending on where they had to go, and it wasn’t realistically possible to survey people mid-performance. I did also need to introduce myself, as the stranger child, which took some time, but most people took it well and answered helpfully. While it would have been nice to have surveyed every attendee, I was still comfortable with my survey data and empirical observations to draw other conclusions about the event. For example, while the gender split was roughly 50/50, the audience skewed older. The average age of Ellenville is around 40, but most participants said they were over 40, with at least 3 identifying as over 70. Yet, most concertgoers tend to be younger. Again, this may simply reflect the realities of Ellenville, but I thought it was interesting to note.
I cover the rest of my findings in my presentation, but the concert was certainly a fulfilling end to ten or so weeks of research on benefit concerts. I’ll see you next time.
Week 12: Signing Off
Hi all,
Throughout the past few months, it has been an honor getting the chance to explore my love for concerts in a way I’ve never really thought to do before, and even getting to organize my own! Though my humble show in Ellenville pales in comparison to the blockbuster spectacles of Live Aid or other such mega-events, I believe it to be a good stepping stone for what hopefully is to come in undergrad and beyond. Working on my final deliverable, I outlined an idea for a project centered around homelessness in NYC. With sky-high rent prices and record-low vacancy rates, indicating a severe housing shortage, NYC is in trouble, and homeless people are perhaps feeling it the worst. To this end, a benefit concert calling for action from City Hall and the local administration to counteract homelessness seems like a worthwhile project to pursue.
I also, of course, created my Senior Project Final Presentation. While it was rather long, both in rehearsal and in the real deal, I believe my enjoyment of the subject shined through and hopefully made people interested enough to follow along.
I have learned far, far more about musical history through this project than I may have ever otherwise. From the creation of charity singles like We Are The World to the origins of the Secret Policeman’s Ball with Monty Python and Amnesty International, there are so many rich nuggets of information that altogether form one big web, with multiple timelines seeming to intersect as the worlds that are the egos of 80s rockstars collided. In any case, if it wasn’t clear already, that’s awesome, and I feel overjoyed to have glimpsed into this slice of musical history in such a fulfilling and involved way, even if Ellenville is not on the map yet. I give my thanks to Mr. Rappelfeld for his advice throughout the project, to BASIS Independent Brooklyn for letting me pursue this project, and to Mr. Goldman for being my close co-organizer for the concert itself. That’s all I’ve got. I’ll see you someday.
Gustavo