Everything about One World: Together at Home

This Saturday, April 18, the One World: Together at Home concert took place, led by the singer Lady Gaga, who intended with this concert to bring some relief for everyone with a little music. The event lasted around eight hours, in which many artists made presentations from home and great figures of this crisis such as doctors, rulers and epidemiologists made the presentations of the artists and intervened from time to time. The concert was broadcasted on different live platforms and involved around a hundred artists who, concerned about the psychological state, mental health and awakening a feeling of solidarity among their fans, wanted with this event to bring relief with songs that we could hear from the house.

The future of the music industry

Many have wondered if this will be the future of the music industry and the aura of live music. The truth is that although very moving, One World: Together at Home has also shown that streaming broadcasts cannot in any way be the future of live music. The arrangements that are made in a live production can not be done from home and although very moving, the fans have repeated that they would not pay for an event of this nature. The discussion and debate on what will become of live music in the future are open, or at least for the next 18 months (year and a half) in which there will be no massive events, which will feed the music industry.

Also Read: The best musical compositions of John Williams in Star Wars

Why a concert from home?

As stated before, the main objective of this concert was to bring relief and some distraction while reflecting in times of crisis. Celebrities also donated money to fight the COVID-19 crisis, the virus that keeps us all at home. This resource of gathering artists around a cause has happened before and is almost perfectly effective. We had already seen the late Michael Jackson bring them all together to sing We are the world to raise funds and reflect on hunger in Africa. It's exciting and a good resource to see our most beloved celebrities gathered to give us some hope.

This time, however, it is perhaps different. Our "common enemy" is a virus that has no will. The narrative in the One World: Together at Home interventions was always to "get through this together", but the reality of this crisis is that there is no way to combat this strange enemy. The war speech has already been used by the governments of different countries (in Colombia doctors are treated as soldiers and in France Macron talks about winning a battle) and now it has inundated the music industry, albeit more passively.

Although it does not make sense to consider the way out of this crisis as the victory of a war, since the virus is not an opponent with a will nor does it profit from the death that it brings, this speech does help to alleviate our minds. In this sense, One World: Together at Home is effective in achieving its objective: giving us an explanation for the inexplicable and making us believe that with the help of everyone we will get out of this crisis.