Live Nation Shares Findings From St. Vincent Concert Experiment

John Davisson – St. Vincent
St. Vincent cranks it up during The Hangout Beach, Music & Art Festival at Gulf Shores Public Beach in Alabama May 19.

Live Nation presented the results of a biometric study June 22 at the Cannes Lion festival in France.

The study conducted at a St. Vincent concert, showed going to live shows generally causes positive shifts in brain activity.

To perform the experiment, Live Nation arranged for each attendee to don an EEG wearable headband to measure brain-wave activity, and skin sensors to measure galvanic skin response and sweat during a St. Vincent show.

The results showed 90 percent of respondents had increased attention and engagement and a mood increase of 5X after attending the show. Also, within minutes of starting the gig, participants had a 53 percent increase in emotional intensity.

After the show ended, 57 percent of respondents said “live music helps me form real connections with people,” which may have been related to the 300 percent increase in synchronized movement, which related to an increase in oxytocin. It also showed 90 percent of participants had a favorable shift in brain activity.

“The genesis for conducting the biometric study stemmed from recent findings from Live Nation’s Global Research, which surveyed over 22,000 live music fans, revealing that across the world – we are feeling isolated and overloaded with information,” Russell Wallach, Live Nation’s global president of sponsorships, said in a statement. “70 percent of respondents – across generations – expressed that live music is a powerful antidote to this trend. We wanted to further prove that point and correlate the link between how we think we feel and how we actually feel.”

The presentation of results was made at Cannes Lions international Festival of Creativity. The study was done in partnership with a team of neuroscientists, Cisco and TBD Labs, a creative technology firm.