Billy Strings and the Art of the Concert Livestream

It is no secret that a cornerstone of the jamgrass king’s success has been the development of a rabid community of fans that drink in every drop of music the band puts out. But a community like that – Deadheads, Phans, now Goats – doesn’t just spontaneously appear out of nowhere. In the past and present, these communities are built all around the live tours. Dedicated, kind, often intoxicated fans that follow around these bands as they travel the country (sometimes even the world) and find a sense of community selling bootleg merch on lot, taping shows, or just sharing a joint with a group of like minded folks. At its core, it’s the same phenomonon that we have seen occur with Billy and his band over the last few years, but with a key difference: we live in the age of internet and the complex interconnectivity that follows. I want to explore how Billy and his team exploited that difference to do something nobody had really ever done before: turn a podunk bluegrass act into an arena production rivaling any rock band in energy and excitement.

First, a bit of history

Bluegrass, as most of you probably know if you found your way to the Pickin’ Frog, is a form of american folk music first coined by the legendary Bill Monroe and his Blue Grass Boys in 1939. It evolved out of the much older american tradition of “hillbilly string music,” in turn rooted in the black gospel and slave hymns that rang over much of the South until 1865.¹ Bill Monroe’s new approach combined elements of these past musical traditions, as well as adding several pieces that would become staples of the sound: for example, the bluegrass style of singing that would become known as that “high and lonesome sound”; a faster, more rhythmic approach that lent itself well to virtuosic solos; and overall incorporating more of the Irish and Scottish folk traditions, as well as the black blues and jazz traditions. This combination evidently captivated audiences, and after a few more players appeared on the scene (one important one being Earl Scruggs, who cemented his own fast-paced, virtuosic approach to playing the banjo), bluegrass was here to stay.

I’m sure most of you know, this was a very different bluegrass than most of what you get at a Billy Strings show. However, one of the things I love most about Billy is how firmly grounded in the bluegrass tradition he is. His hero is Doc Watson, one of the greatest guitar pickers to ever walk this good earth, and he regularly credits bluegrass (specifically “Rank Stranger” played by The Stanley Brothers) as saving his life and helping him get california sober. Sometimes he encores with a solo a cappella rendition of “Am I Born to Die?”, an extremely old traditional hymn, that typically brings close to all 15,000 people at the show to the brink of tears. He digs deep into the bluegrass catalog to find songs that talk about the cities he is playing in, or does bluegrass renditions of other songs that bring the city to mind – my favorite example is Dylan’s “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine” played at St. Auggy in 2022 and at Tampa² in 2023 (the week before the Augustine run). The rest of the show? Typically a little different.

Sorry – a bit more history

Now that we now have a good understanding of how bluegrass came about, and its lasting impacts on all sorts of music today, we need to briefly talk about the other half of “jamgrass.” Jambands and bluegrass have been deeply intertwined from the beginning; Jerry Garcia was a banjo player in a bluegrass band, Old & In the Way, and had a deep love for american folk music that is clearly evident in the Grateful Dead’s own tunes. In a way then, it was pretty logical that one day the two fledgling genres would become deeply intertwined³. The Dead, I would argue, along with some help from the Allman Brothers, Traffic, and other bands from the classic rock and early psychedelic era, were creating something new. The focus was almost entirely on the live performance, to the point that they were innovating not only in sound design (the Wall of Sound) but also in audience experience (LSD). Although not necessarily the first act to regularly play two sets at shows, they certainly solidified it as a pillar of the jam concert experience, eventually following a certain framework for setlists that tracked the progression of the audience’s chemically induced trip – start out with some easy going americana tunes, big jam, cool off again, weave back into the jam, take a little set break (this is where things would usually start to get weird) and by the time the audience was peaking (if they dropped at the beginning of the show) the Dead was traveling through realms unknown with Drums and Space.

Now, this sounds pretty fucking familiar. It’s very similar to how Billy (and most jam bands) structure their shows – though never exactly the same, he alternates sometimes 40+ minute sections of psychedelic jamming with strings of short, more traditional sounding bluegrass songs. It takes the audience on a musical journey (all these years later, still often aided by various psychoactive drugs) that leaves them with a lasting feeling of happiness and gratitude. This is a key part of why I think jambands have created such tight-knit, inclusive communities. The music, the drugs, the fun tie-dyes, but most importantly the music leaves people just feeling…good. Watching a talented band peak a jam I think is one of the more euphoric experiences a person can have, drugs involved or not⁴. However, there is another key to the unique flavor of jamband community building. Because the communities are built around, and thrive on, live performance, building a real following requires people beyond those able to go “on tour” with the band to be able to hear the live music. And with that we get back to the original intent of this article: the art of the livestream.

From tapes to streams

The Dead, and the bands that came after, quickly discovered a great way to share the live experience with those who could not attend: audience members who would “tape” the show (a mic stand that would record into a cassette at its core). The band encouraged tapers to attend, even giving them a special section (The Tapers Section) so their gear would not block other’s views. They encouraged reproductions and distribution of these bootlegs, trading, collection, etc. Certain shows would gain notoriety and there grew an entire culture around listening to, collecting, and trading tapes. Tapes had their downsides, though. It’s a piece of physical media, so you had to actually have the thing to listen to it, and tape was not a perfect medium for recording – often some distortion or hiss would be present. Still, the act of taping, and arguable more importantly, the act of encouragement and support by the band, was irrefutably a hugely important part of the Dead’s massive success.

While some people still tape⁵, with the advent of the internet in the 90’s, somebody – a young head named Brad Serling – saw the opportunity to centralize this “taping” phenomonon – a place where bands could upload either audience tapes or high quality soundboard recordings – and fans could pay to download digital files or have a CD shipped to them with the show. All of a sudden, these bands that had relied on word of mouth and excitement of tapers to spread their live experience and gain popularity had a place to distribute their live music at an unprecedented rate and infinite reach.

We now know this company as nugs.net.⁶ Since then, the technological advances of streaming have changed the landscape, but the core concept remains the same. Fans pay a monthly subscription to nugs to access both current and archival recordings of high quality, sound board audio from hundreds of bands. The internet made it possible for people all over the world to hear the live music of Billy and feel connected to the community, furthered by the new opportunity to find like-minded fans online, not only on tour.

Around 2020 – about 25 years into this new form of live media distribution – we took another quantum leap forward. Why 2020, you ask? Well that was the COVID year. Everybody stuck at home. Expensive, though usually fun, drive-in concerts. Concert livestreams had been around for about a decade, pioneered by Phish in 2010 at MSG (in partnership with Brad Serling, of course, who was also working with the Dead and Pearl Jam at this point). However, they hadn’t ever really taken off as a primary form of music consumption. Everything changed in 2020. A few bands – notably Billy Strings and his heroes/former mentors Greensky Bluegrass – saw the opportunity to play shows to an empty venue, and stream live to an audience of thousands all over the world. I remember watching those shows. I had seen, hundreds, if not thousands, of concert videos on YouTube. This was different. First off, it was a complete performance from start to finish with HiFi audio and a real light show, along with closeups of the playing itself. But there was something deeper going on too, and that was this sense of knowing that all these other people all over were listening to this same music at the same time as me. It’s a feeling I often get at shows when the crowd is really into it, singing and dancing and smiling a lot. That sense of belonging is wonderful, and by making the live stream the center of the performance – not an afterthought, second to those actually at the show – they managed to bring that feeling to those on “couch tour.”

These COVID streams shot Billy from opening for Greensky to headlining larger shows of his own in an incredibly short span of time, and it seems everyone in the industry learned something from that.⁷ Ever since COVID, there has been more and more streams available on nugs, now at the point where there are multiple options almost every night. Billy streams basically every show free for subscribers, and there is a large contingent of fans that spend far more time on “couch tour” than actual tour (including myself). And now, with the pervasive and widespread use of social media, not only can you experience the show from your couch, but you can stay plugged into the community itself on Reddit and Instagram. I don’t have a lot of friends in real life that love this music, that understand this music, that are moved by it like I do. Doing this @billy.winning thing on Instagram, though, has allowed me to meet so many other like-minded folks to talk about this thing we love with. Throw on the stream, pull up Instagram, and I can watch, enjoy, and privately discuss the show with my friends online. And Billy and his team, of course, understand how good a surrogate this is for actually being at the show, and have capitalized on it in a big way.

Billy Streams, and then, Billy Posts

Billy Strings has 830k followers on Instagram. To give you an example of how obscene that number is, Phish has 332k, Goose has 200k. Trey has 262k. Now Billy’s audience probably does lean a bit younger than Phish’s, but not 500k people younger, and it certainly doesn’t lean younger than Goose. For all these bands, there also exists a network of accounts of band members, venues, promoters, and funnily enough, meme accounts (of which I am but a small player in a large community).

Billy has leaned into this network a lot harder than pretty much anyone else, I think, which I’m sure has helped grow his Instagram reach and therefore his greater musical community. His account typically posts 4 times a day on a show day. First around noon to show off the show posters and promote the stream, or tickets if any are left. Then again when the show is starting, a reminder to go watch on nugs. Finally, after every show, that night, a post with the setlist against an iconic spot in the city or venue, and then a second post with pictures from the show thanking the community. He usually hangs out in the comments for a bit and thanks people for their kind remarks about the playing that night. When not touring, he checks in on the meme pages every so often, liking a post or leaving a comment here or there. He has little stream of thought conversations on Instagram Live and posts impromptu pickin’ reels; he gives back to this internet community that has sprung up around his and many others’ music.

I think that is really what split Billy from the pack. It feels like he is actually a present member of this de-centralized, online community, and between that and the shared “couch tour” experience, has managed to make it feel more like we are all on tour together. And I will be forever grateful for that. Thank you Billy and co. for innovating not just your music and playstyles, but the way we experience the music itself. I’m sure Jerry and Owlsey would be proud.

Footnotes

1. Analyzing the evolution of bluegrass through the lense of race is actually fascinating, and at times quite tragic. For example, the banjo is an instrument that evolved out of traditional African gourd instruments on slave plantations in the 18th century. As such, for a long time, it was seen as instrument below that of white players, only used by white folks (in blackface) for the horrifically racist “minstrel shows” that peaked in the 19th century. I am currently working an article that takes a much deeper dive into this sort of stuff, so stay tuned! ↩︎
2. That Tampa show might be my favorite of all time. Check it out! [Tape] [Nugs] ↩︎
3. Bands and players that experimented with this combination started quickly popping up on the scene and gaining a following – John Hartford, David Grisman, New Grass Revival, Leftover Salmon, String Cheese Incident, Yonder Mountain String Band, and so on, laying the foundation for what was to come. ↩︎
4. The interplay of psychedelics and the concert experience is something I’m very interested in thinking and writing about. I would be curious to hear people’s thoughts. ↩︎
5. Tapers still exist at most jam shows, including at Billy’s. Check out the app Relisten or the Live Music Archive at https://archive.org/details/etree ↩︎
6. I would like to make it very clear that although I pay for nugs, I am not endorsing them in the slightest. They have grown far too large for the software platform they still use, and if they don’t work on updating it soon, it’s going to all come crashing down. Beyond that, the user interface is trash, it crashes all the time, it’s slow, it’s insecure, I could go on. But I pay because the music is simply too good and I’m a sucker for HiFi sound. ↩︎
7. Of course there were other bands that this happened to (Goose comes to mind, though their meteoric rise started before COVID), but I’m focusing on the stuff I know well. ↩︎