The Clash: Are music festivals better on TV?

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15 Apr, 2015 09:35 PM3 mins to read

Tyler The Creator performs at the 2015 Coachella Music and Arts Festival. Photo / AP

Why go to a music festival when you can watch it from the comfort of your own home? Chris Schulz and Lydia Jenkin have their say.

Chris Schulz says:

How was your weekend? Because mine was amazing. I saw Tyler, the Creator, rap while standing on top of a giant cartoon bed. I saw Zach De La Rocha and Travis Barker perform with an incredibly hyped Run the Jewels. I watched The Weekend rip through a stellar set of smoky R&B with one of the weirdest haircuts I've ever seen. I watched this incredibly random French band, Yelle, get very weird indeed. And I saw Madonna chew Drake's face off with the festival's biggest WTF moment yet. I loved every second of it.

Best of all, to achieve this I didn't sleep on a paper-thin mattress with drunkards waking me up every five minutes. I didn't have my view of the stage obscured by super-tall freaks. And I didn't have to use those notorious festival toilets. I didn't even have to live on seven slices of pizza a day. I had a hot shower, chilled drinks and salty snacks available within metres of the stage.

Yep, I spent all weekend glued to Coachella's livestreams from the comfort of my lounge, and with three YouTube channels dedicated to the event, it was just like being there. The coverage is incredible: multiple cameras cover most of the big name acts (AC/DC was the only obvious omission), cameras sweep over the crowd and across the stage to capture every moment, and if you don't like an act (Gaslamp Killers and David Guetta, I'm looking in your direction), you can switch between streams at will.

It's just like voting with your feet at a real live festival, without suffering those crippling leg cramps at the end of the day. See you next year, Coachella. I promise to buy a better home theatre system, just for you.

Lydia Jenkin says:

Festival attendees look on at a performance at the 2015 Coachella Music and Arts Festival. Photo / AP

Yeah, we all like the idea of cold drinks and salty snacks while watching our favourite new bands, but come on, you don't go to a music festival to be comfortable, do you? The whole idea is to put yourself through dehydration, sunstroke, sandstorms, sleep deprivation, terrible toilet experiences, and endless queues, so that when you do see your heroes lighting up a stage only 30m away, and you can feel the sunscreen stinging your eyes, and smell the gross beer-breath of the guy standing too close behind you, it seems so much sweeter. Right?

I'll be honest, I've never been to Coachella, and some of the stories I've heard fill me with horror. But, jokes aside, I'm also a staunch believer that there's nothing like a live concert.

Singing along with 45,000 others to Rage Against The Machine at the Big Day Out in 2008 made surviving the madness so worthwhile. Making friends with strangers dancing next to us as we watched Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings explode on the Womad main stage more than made up for sleeping on a leaky air mattress.

And the magic of seeing Erykah Badu seduce a crowd with her silky voice, gold chains and a top hat as waves lapped on the shore at Splore was enough to wipe three days of portaloos from my mind.

None of that would've had half the impact when translated through a TV or computer screen in my living room.

So while live streams might be a good stop-gap for those who can't make it to the festival in question, they're never going to be better than the real experience, no matter how uncomfortable.