How Instagram Live Became Appointment Viewing

As life continues in lockdown, a wild, weird, and original ecosystem of celebrity has flourished on our phones.
Timbaland and Swizz Beatz on IGStory

On Instagram Live on any given day over the past two months, you may have watched SZA lead a sound bowl meditation, Rihanna and Lil Uzi Vert do the Futsal Shuffle, or Offset make an offer on Reese Witherspoon’s dad’s car. Seemingly overnight, Instagram Live has become a digital smorgasbord, catering to all manner of pop-culture predilections, many of which you probably didn't know you had in the first place. It’s now the premiere venue for a collection of semiregular events that attract viewership from the hundreds to the hundreds of thousands. The aforementioned Rihanna/Uzi duet occurred on a new livestream show called “Fenty Social Club.” The March 31 edition of Canadian rapper Tory Lanez’s raucous “Quarantine Radio'' featured Drake as a special guest and attracted over 300,000 viewers. Anderson .Paak and Kaytranada teased two new songs from an unreleased project on the April 10 edition of .Paak’s bouncy living room show, “Fridance.” While all these shows differ in content, there’s an energetic thread that runs throughout them: a quaint clumsiness and a spontaneous sort of humanity that you rarely encounter in such abundance on celebrity social media channels.

Arguably, nothing has been as quaint and clumsy as Verzuz. Every week for the past month, a pair of accomplished musicians has convened on a joint Instagram Live stream to share 20 songs from their respective catalogs as part of a “battle.” The idea for the series actually dates as far back as 2008. That summer, hip-hop producer Swizz Beatz and a post-Graduation Kanye West squared off on the Hot 97 Summer Jam stage, performing a back-and-forth medley of their hits.

Ten years later, Beatz battled on the Summer Jam stage for a second time, this time against Timbaland. In late March, the pair of legendary producers hopped on Instagram Live and decided to stage an impromptu, socially distanced rematch. The popularity of this initial broadcast inspired a string of copycats. Soon, other music producers and songwriters, like Ne-Yo and Johntá Austin, and The Dream and Sean Garrett, were staging digital sound clashes of their own, prompting Beatz and Timbaland to capitalize on their invention and formalize the series under the moniker Verzuztv.

The appeal to music fans was immediately clear: Seeing the architects of some of the greatest hip-hop and R&B hits of the past three decades sharing their best work feels like rewatching your favorite movie with live director’s commentary. Nearly 200,000 people tuned in on April 12 to watch rap luminaries DJ Premier and the Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA play some of the era-defining hits that they produced, like Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s “Shimmy Shimmy Ya” and Biggie’s “Ten Crack Commandments.” Each ensuing installation has also been a boon to content-starved social media timelines, catering to the internet’s insatiable appetite for nostalgia, our incessant need to rank things, and an impeccable ability to wring seemingly endless memetic value out of pop culture micro-moments. And while the immense popularity of an Instagram Live show has likely come as a surprise to some, in retrospect, all the makings of magic were already in place.

Instagram Live has quietly been the Facebook-owned photo-sharing platform’s more interesting labyrinth for some time now. It’s where rappers go to dance to snippets of unreleased music, where politicians make mac and cheese, and where Cardi B is at her most Cardi B. However, since its debut in the fall of 2016, the feature—which allows users to broadcast in real time to their followers and/or anyone who happens to visit their profile—has persisted as the grid and timeline’s undertrafficked stepbrother. If you are like me, it was a space you only ventured into out of boredom—or, as was more often the case, accidentally. Now, thanks to the isolated doldrums of quarantine, it has taken center stage. According to Facebook spokesperson Seine Kim, Instagram Live views in the U.S. have “increased more than 70% in the last month.” The inability to go to live concerts or see movies in theaters (or really leave our homes much at all) seems to have given us the push we needed to dive head-first into Instagram’s awkward, lo-fi, and unpredictable world.

Awkward, lo-fi, and unpredictable is where Verzuz is at its best. It’s essentially just watching two famous people who may or may not know each other well play each other music over a video call. Anyone who has participated in a Zoom meeting in the past month might understand how stressful and hilarious a proposition this is. Levels of tech savviness among participants can vary—fans watched DJ Premier monologue for nearly 10 minutes, as the 54-year-old hip-hop legend apparently didn’t understand how to accept RZA’s request to join the broadcast. Sessions are liable to end unexpectedly, video may lag, and, as was the case for this past Sunday’s Babyface vs. Teddy Riley showdown, audio quality between participants can be a hurdle. For a seemingly interminable stretch, Babyface and the stream’s nearly 400,000 viewers watched as Teddy Riley—and what appeared to be a full audiovisual team, including a live DJ and drummer—tried to solve some sort of sound issue before eventually deciding to postpone the event altogether.

It is this exact goofiness and lack of polish that makes Verzuz and any of the other Instagram Live celebrity programming birthed during this unprecedented time fun, funny, and refreshingly human. For years, much was made of the way social media had knocked down the old, PR-fortified walls between celebrity and fan. Twitter and Instagram presented a direct line of access to the celebrity in their most unvarnished state—or so we thought. In reality, newer, more elaborate walls were erected; that varnish just became FaceTune. This new Instagram Live ecosystem is a strange and welcome reprieve from the blinding, high-end sheen of typical premium celebrity #content. It’s a rare chance to see these consummate performers thrown off a bit, to watch them not simply talk extemporaneously as they would on, say, a late-night show, but—just like the rest of us right now—live extemporaneously, to figure it out on the fly.

And who knows just how long we’ll be at this? As the weeks of quarantine turn into months, and we learn that the months may turn into a year, many of us are starting to accept that the barrel we’re staring down is likely much longer than we had initially assumed. To adapt to this new reality, the channels through which we receive entertainment will necessarily have to shift. We may all soon be more acquainted with all kinds of live streaming, a format already popular in Esports and among Gen Z. On March 10, Goldenvoice announced that Coachella had been postponed from its original dates in April to early October. Perhaps by then, we’ll be watching Frank Ocean’s headlining set on Twitch.

On Monday night, 24 hours after the sound fiasco, Teddy Riley and Babyface reconvened for take two of their Verzuz battle. The unerringly suave Babyface appeared solo, once again, in his studio surrounded by candles, exchanging the previous night’s black velvet blazer for a new maroon one. For about an hour, nearly 500,000 viewers, including at various points Queen Latifah, Rashida Jones, Diddy, Snoop Dogg, and Michelle Obama, watched as the two R&B legends exchanged hits from the '80s, '90s, and early '00s. At one point Babyface even pulled out a guitar to play a lo-fi rendition of his newly apt 1993 hit, “When Can I See You.” Riley, for his part, ditched the camera crew and sound team this time around and appeared alone as well. He sounded perfectly clear.


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