The possibilities and pitfalls of capturing livestreamed performances

If the internet and social media represent the first wave of radical transformation of people’s social lives from analog to digital, then the COVID-19 pandemic signifies a second wave of transformation virtualizing almost all areas of the social world. To maintain health and safety precautions, business and social interactions shifted online, transforming in-person exchanges into a digitally mediated experience. Particularly, music executives striving to create the best online “live” experience are confronted with platforms with a limited set of options. Equally, as researchers, we are challenged with complex issues around how to capture and analyze composite data—visual and textual—generated across multiple online platforms, for livestreamed events where multiple actors are generating content simultaneously. This chapter examines the American-based Verzuz battle phenomenon, which includes livestreaming events that pit two music artists against each other in the style of “rap battles” on multiple platforms. To explore this issue, we focus on the affordances of the digital sphere to produce “live” events and the subsequent affordances of the research technologies available to capture and analyze a multiplicity of data to construct a realistic representation of livestreamed performances.