You're the rays on the waves that calm my mind

The show is the first in a series of events called Apple Music Live.

Apple Music will start livestreaming some concerts from major artists this week as part of a new series. Apple Music Live kicks off with a Harry Styles show that subscribers in 167 countries will able to watch live and at no extra cost on May 20th. The company says Apple Music Live is a way to “give the biggest stars in music the biggest possible platform to flaunt how they connect with audiences and how their songs translate to live performance.”

The concert takes place at UBS Arena in Long Island, New York. It’s effectively a record release party for Styles, whose third album, Harry’s House, comes out on the same day. Apple Music’s landing page for the event includes an interview with Styles about the making of the album, a link for users to pre-add Harry’s House to their library and a bunch of playlists focused on the performer.

This seems like a smart way for artists to both promote new releases and give people a sense of what their live shows are like to perhaps sell some more tickets. It could also help Apple Music persuade fans of artists whose shows it streams to sign up for the service.

Styles’ gig, titled “One Night Only in New York,” will be available to stream at 9PM ET on Friday. So that folks in other parts of the world can catch the show at a more reasonable time, there will be encore streams on May 22nd at noon ET and May 26th at 5AM. That suggests the concert won’t be available on demand afterward. When asked by Engadget for clarification on that, an Apple spokesperson said the company had “nothing to announce at this time.”

Several other platforms have streamed live shows to viewers. YouTube has broadcast performances from Coachella over the last several years. As it happens, Styles was one of the festival’s headliners this year. Hulu just inked a deal to stream the Lollapalooza, Bonnaroo and Austin City Limits music festivals this year and next. Amazon Music has baked in artists’ Twitch streams, while Amazon has streamed live shows on a ticketed basis and offered them to Prime Video subscribers afterward.

Apple has some experience in livestreaming concerts too. In 2007, it started running the iTunes Festival (later known as the Apple Music Festival) in the UK before expanding it to the US in 2014. Apple announced in 2017 that the festival had come to an end.

(Yes, this is a response to a post going around how maybe it’s okay if adults are in fandom as long as they understand that fandom is for ickle kiddie-boos and walk on eggshells.  Um, no.  Back in my day, we kicked y’all off our yahoogroups so we could post adult material, and rigorously didn’t post adult material if the list allowed you.)

So, back in the day, several of the authors of an LJ community that posted NSFW fic met up and had a group photo, which they posted.  Apparently, some of the 18 year olds said, “Ewwwwwww!  They’re all, like, oooooollllld!” 

There’s actually a good reason for that. 

Writing is part being good with words and part being good at turning your life experiences into something that other people want to read.  Remember my previous rant about how you can’t assume a mystery writer is a homicidal maniac, and you can’t assume that a reader who likes a character has the same personal flaws as that character?  There’s a reason people assume these things about authors. 

See, if you’ve never fallen in love, you might think romance is when the other person brings you a dozen roses and a box of chocolates.  And that’s fine!  That’s romantic, too!  But if you have fallen in love, you might remember the time that you woke up and went to go to class and found a bunch of wildflowers and a plastic ring from a bubblegum machine tucked under your windshield wiper.  And you might remember the half touched, half about to burst out laughing expression on your sweetie’s face when you showed up to class wearing that tacky plastic ring.  You might think that love is thinking the other person is the best-looking person in the world, or that love is wanting to spend your life with someone else.  That’s love, too! Well, at least the second one is (the first is probably just infatuation). But if you’ve been in love before you’ll know that love is also hurting all over because your sweetie’s abusive parent died and they’re unexpectedly destroyed over it.  The latter is worth a million flowery declarations. 

Now, I’m not saying that no one under 30 can write.  Some young people have had very full lives.  And some young people have a natural talent for extrapolating from their own feelings.  Virgins can write convincingly about sex, even.  But the more life experience you have, the easier it is to extrapolate, and the easier it is to come up with the specific details that make things feel real and true.