Online concerts have grown in popularity while mobility and gathering conditions have been restricted. Live streaming allows hundreds of thousands to watch a concert at the same time, but audience interaction is still extremely constrained on these platforms. Many attendees turn instead to social media to connect with each other, recreating some of the interactions they might have had at a live show.
In different samples of twitter activity during multiple live-streamed concerts by BTS in 2021, we look at the dynamic interplay between concert stream content, fans' expressive behaviour, and their attentional priorities between the stage (the live stream) and each other (twitter timeline). Retweets (RT) are the most common event in both the concert hashtag samples and the monitored users and keyword streams. The RT rate goes down during musical performances, up again between sets, and explodes after the show. In contrast, original tweets tend to increase with musical performances, and change character (length and complexity) when there is less action on stage.
The global BTS fan base demonstrate a substantial effort to see these performances, paying ~40 USD per online show and adapting their lives to watch these concerts in distant time zones. That so many divide their attention between the performance and their social media community underlines how audience interaction is crucial to their concert attendance strategy. More than just consumers of a performance, they are creating and curating a collective experience in real time with the technology available, official or not.