This year got off to quite a start for French music, with Jean-Michel Jarre, whose new year's eve virtual performance Welcome to the Other Side attracted over 75 million viewers from around the world.
Jarre is no stranger to large audiences, with many of his open-air concerts attracting crowds of over one million. His concert in Moscow in 1997 attracted 3.5 million people - a world record - while his show at La Defense Paris in 1990 was attended by 2.5 million.
While Jarre's always been at the pioneering end of electronic music, he's also probably done more that any artist to popularise it. I've no doubt he played a huge part in electronic music becoming popular in the 70s, leading to it being adopted by other artists at the end of that decade.
For the New Year's Eve show Jarre performed in a studio in Paris, the Notre Dame staging being created virtually. It was staged across a wide range of online platforms, including Facebook and YouTube, virtual reality headset devices, as well as on TV and radio. A team of 50 were involved in preparing the event over three months.
Speaking ahead of the show he said: "Virtual reality is to the performing arts today what cinema was to the theatre in its early days, a kind of curiosity.
“I believe that VR will become tomorrow, a mode of expression in its own right.”
The performance has been released as a digital album, and is now available on streaming platforms.
No comments:
Post a Comment