S3 8/10 Why We Gather: Femke Vandenberg (Sociologist) on how to create connection and that magical energy during your live experience

The Live Coaches

*This is a special English spoken episode of The Live Coaches
What causes the magical energy that can occur at live shows? Why do people like to go to concerts? And how can insight in your audience’s motivations to come to your show, help you to transform your performance into a memorable experience?
Live shows can be magical. An energy can take hold that is hard to find anywhere else. It can cause people to completely let go, scream their lungs out, dance, mosh and break through their usual comfort zones. But just as often, that energy is missing. To explore what this magical energy is and how you as an artist can create it, we invited cultural sociologist and audience researcher Femke Vandenberg.
Femke currently works as an assistant professor of audience research at the University of Groningen. Before that she did her PHD research into the collective potential of live music. For this research she spent years visiting concerts and talking to audiences to find out why they went to concerts, what they liked about them and what they got out of it.
In this episode we discuss what she found. You’ll hear why some music genres are better at bringing people together than others, why audience interaction is so important, why it’s harder for smaller artists to get a crowd to the same energy levels as bigger artists - ánd how to overcome the obstacles that are in the way and reach your maximum live potential.
Follow @TheLiveCoaches on Instagram for inspiration, fragments and updates on new episodes and check out www.thelivecoaches.nl/podcast/s3whywegather for links to everything we discuss and more info about our coaching and workshops!
Ready? Let’s go!

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The Live Coaches is recorded in Studio Pandora in TivoliVredenburg and supported by De Basis and Het Cultuurfonds.

Chapter

1. S3 8/10 Why We Gather: Femke Vandenberg (Sociologist) on how to create connection and that magical energy during your live experience (00:00:00)

2. Episode introduction (00:01:38)

3. Femke introduces who she is and what she researchers (00:03:50)

4. What does a sociologist do? (00:05:07)

5. How working in an Irish bar in Enschede caused Femke to research concert and music audiences (00:06:02)

6. What is the collective potential of live music? (00:09:07)

7. The sociology behind the concert experience: where did Femke begin her research to find out why we go to concerts? (00:10:40)

8. The ingredients needed to create collective effervescence (00:18:51)

9. The importance of audience interaction (00:26:45)

10. Why some music genres are better at bringing people together than others (00:27:23)

11. Why do we like going to concerts so much? (00:30:21)

12. How audience members with different motivations can disturb each others concert experience (00:33:19)

13. Should all artists aim to create a feeling of Collective Effervescence? (00:37:12)

14. Why is it harder for small artists than for bigger artists to hype up an audience? (00:42:55)

15. Why it’s important that your audience has the right expectations of your show (00:48:01)

16. What the artist can do in their performance to create collective effervescence (00:51:13)

17. How Joost Klein sets himself up to create collective effervescence even before he comes on stage (00:54:50)

18. What is a concert? (00:58:49)