Performing to the void: Rock musicians’ experiences of digital liveness in online streaming concerts

The COVID-19 pandemic forced live music onto digital platforms, disrupting liveness – the shared, real-time experience between performers and audiences. While research on digitally mediated concerts has examined audience experience and platform affordances, the perspective of performers, who must actively produce liveness, remains comparatively underexamined in English-language media and performance scholarship. This study examines how rock musicians construct digital liveness in online streaming concerts, drawing on focus group and in-depth interviews with 30 Korean rock band performers (6–47 years of experience) and one concert producer. Focusing on the three components of liveness in which performer agency is most directly implicated – audience interaction, temporality, and role reversal – the study finds that digital liveness did not arise from technological affordance alone. Rather, it was produced through performer conscious participation : the deliberate perceptual and emotional work of constituting an absent audience as co-present. The liveness so produced remained partial, fragile, and materially distinct from venue-based liveness, yet it converted mere transmission into performance. These findings extend Auslander’s theory of digital liveness through a triangular model in which technological affordance, audience wilful participation, and performer conscious participation jointly constitute digital liveness. The forms this participation took reflect the resource constraints of independent music production under pandemic conditions.