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Øya taps Jack White to replace QOTSA as headliner

Norway’s Øya Festival has confirmed that Jack White will replace Queens of the Stone Age as headliner of its 25th anniversary edition.

QOTSA have cancelled a further slate of European festival dates due to frontman Josh Homme requiring “continued medical care” at home in the US.

As well as Øya (9 August), the band have pulled out of slots at Sweden’s Way Out West (8 August), Denmark’s Syd for Solen (10 August), Caberet Vert in France (15 August), Lowlands in the Netherlands (16 August), Belgium’s Pukkelpop (18 August) and Portugal’s Villar de Mouros.

“Due to continued medical care, it is under doctors’ orders that Josh Homme remain in their care in the United States,” says a statement posted on social media. “The Homme family and QOTSA are so grateful for the outpouring of well wishes and kind understanding during this time.”

The rock group previously cancelled a run of July festival dates earlier this month after announcing Homme needed to “return to the United States immediately for emergency surgery”.

Air will replace The Smile, who cancelled their August European tour after multi-instrumentalist Jonny Greenwood was hospitalised

Jack White will headline the Friday night of Oslo-based Øya, which has also revealed that Air will replace The Smile on the bill on the same day. The French electronic music duo will play their debut album Moon Safari in full.

The Smile were also recently forced to cancel their August European tour dates after multi-instrumentalist Jonny Greenwood was hospitalised with an infection.

Set for 6-10 August, Øya will also be headlined by PJ Harvey and Pulp, Janelle Monáe and Gabrielle. Other names performing include The Kills, Vince Staples, The National, Slowdive, Big Thief, Arca, Sampha and Idles.

Organisers say this year’s festival is close to selling out, with fewer than 1,000 day tickets remaining for Friday and 400 for Saturday, while week passes are already sold out.

 


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IQ 108 out now: 10 things we learned from the pandemic

IQ 108, the latest issue of the international live music industry’s favourite monthly magazine, is available to read online now.

In the February 2022 edition, IQ talks to a number of business leaders to identify ten key lessons that the pandemic has taught us.

Elsewhere, IQ editor Gordon Masson talks to the recipient of the 2022 Gaffer Award, Phay ‘Phaymous’ Mac Mahon, about his 40-year career and how he became one of the go-to production managers in the international touring business.

This issue also sees Masson talk to experts about the evolving world of virus mitigation and profile ten products and services that are helping to get businesses up and rolling again.

For this edition’s columns and comments, tour manager Suzi Green explains how music industry support group The Back Lounge is helping the community through a new series of timely and topical free workshops and Driift’s Ric Salmon relives the success of The Smile’s live-stream triple header.

In this month’s Your Shout, execs including Marc Geiger (SaveLive), Georg Leitner (Georg Leitner Productions) and Nick Hobbs (Charmenko) reveal the best showcase they’ve ever seen.

As always, the majority of the magazine’s content will appear online in some form in the next four weeks.

However, if you can’t wait for your fix of essential live music industry features, opinion and analysis, click here to subscribe to IQ for just £5.99 a month – or check out what you’re missing out on with the limited preview below:

 


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Driift on The Smile’s game-changing livestream

Driift CEO Ric Salmon has told IQ that The Smile’s acclaimed trio of gigs in London point a new way forward for livestream shows.

The new group, comprising Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood and Sons Of Kemet’s Tom Skinner, played three consecutive live shows in just over 12 hours at Broadwick Live’s intimate new Magazine venue in London’s Docklands on 29-30 January.

Performed in the round, each performance was held in front of a seated audience of 1,200 and livestreamed in real time via Dreamstage for a different timezone – 8pm UK time on Saturday for EMEA and Sunday at 1am for the Americas, with the band returning 10 hours later at 11am for APAC.

“I couldn’t have been happier,” Salmon tells IQ. “It’s been amazing watching the reactions to it and I have to admit I’ve been bombarded by a bunch of managers saying, ‘Let’s talk.’ So it’s interesting how it’s sparked the imagination.”

Advanced livestream tickets were priced £12.50 (€14.75), or £14.50 (€17.25) on the day of the show, while in-person tickets cost £79. The last few ticket sales are still being totted up as the event, which was filmed with nine cameras, is still available on demand, but Salmon puts the number of paid streams in the “tens of thousands”.

“There’s a two-day VOD window that finishes tomorrow, but suffice to say we’ve sold more tickets than we set out to sell,” he adds. “We had a target number that we set ourselves based on our hopes and expectations, given the fact that this is a new band. Yes, of course, there’s a couple of famous people in the band, but it is a new band and it’s music that hasn’t yet been released. So it was a realistic level that we thought we would hope to sell. We have probably oversold that by 20-30%, so I’m really chuffed with that.”

“We had to keep pushing ourselves creatively to reimagine what these type of events could be”

The UK-based livestreaming company was founded in August 2020 by Salmon and Brian Message and has since sold more than 600,000 tickets for livestreamed gigs with acts including Nick Cave, Niall Horan, Kylie Minogue, Biffy Clyro, Andrea Bocelli, Laura Marling, Dermot Kennedy, Courtney Barnett and Sheryl Crow.

It also partnered with the UK’s Glastonbury Festival on the Live At Worthy Farm event, which also featured The Smile, as well as artists including Coldplay, Haim, Jorja Smith, Idles, Wolf Alice, Michael Kiwanuka and Damon Albarn.

“We’ve been considering how we could evolve what we’re doing for the last year or so, and we were always cognisant of the fact that we had to keep pushing ourselves creatively to reimagine what these types of events could be,” reveals Salmon.

“This concept of a ‘hybrid’ event – where you have a traditional tour show, put some cameras in the venue and then hope to sell some livestream tickets on top of the physical tickets – that just doesn’t interest us at all.  It feels a bit of an afterthought and frankly, I just don’t think the experience would be very good for viewers at home. It would be no better than watching an old DVD or something you can get on YouTube for free. It doesn’t feel artistic, it just feels like a way of making more money perhaps, and that’s not really what drives us.

“Ultimately, we wanted to focus on all of the things that we’ve learned over the last 18 months of doing livestreams without an audience, because we’ve been super-proud of some of the shows we’ve done. The artists were filmed in such close proximity, so when you’re watching at home, it feels really special. So how do you continue to take that and achieve that when there’s an audience in the room? It sounds like a simple question, but it’s a fiendishly difficult thing to pull off.”

“I hope Driift is becoming the first specialist producer and promoter of live events for the digital era”

He continues: “Our singular challenge was to ensure that anyone who saw the show was blown away by it and enjoyed it equally, whether they were in the room or at home, and I think we got close to achieving that. I don’t think that’s ever been done before. And that’s really exciting because, as an industry, it gives us a new format that we can make use of.

“What I hope Driift is becoming is the first – and at the moment only – specialist producer and promoter of live events for the digital era. If you think about it – and this isn’t a criticism – the live music industry is ultimately almost entirely non-digital. There’s hardly anything about the live music industry that is focused for the digital world. And there are very few industries you could say that about in this day and age.

“Almost every industry has found a digital strand to it or developed a digital dimension to it, and bizarrely, the live music industry doesn’t seem to have really focused on that. So it’s cool that we’ve stumbled across this through the lockdown and through the pandemic – there’s no way we would have come up with it if we hadn’t have been forced into the situation we have. But I suppose through those great challenges comes innovation; when you’re forced to innovate, you innovate.”

 


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