10 AR THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, JULY 26, 2020Pop
Erykah Badu has always been a boss, but
now she’s closer to a C.E.O. When the
Covid-19 pandemic halted concerts and the
music industry scrambled to adapt, the
iconoclastic neo-soul singer and songwriter
created a new artistic and business model,
creating her own interactive streaming net-
work less than two weeks after the country
began shutting down this spring.
“I’ve been touring for eight months out of
the year for 22 years,” Badu said. “This is
the way that I had made my money.” She
had family to take care of, and crew that
have been part of her team for two decades.
So she created a high-production, interac-
tive live show from her home (The Quaran-
tine Concert Series: Apocalypse, Live From
Badubotron), charging fans $1 to watch.
And then she did it twice more, charging a
little more each time — three increasingly
elaborate livestreamed performances in
the space of a month, with costume and
lighting changes, and fans voting on the set
list and even what room she would perform
in. In the last concert, she and her musi-
cians appeared to be inside giant clear
bubbles.
“Every day and night, I was working and
moving and experimenting and learning
from mistakes quickly and fixing them,” she
said. According to a spokeswoman, over
100,000 people tuned in. And now she does-
n’t even miss being on the road: “A little
piece of me dies every time I have to leave
my home.”
The process energized Badu, 49, a mother
of three who lives in Dallas, where she’s also
a doula. “All of a sudden, I’ve been resur-
rected in some kind of way, with new ideas
and thoughts and releases of things that I
didn’t even know I was holding on to,” she
said. She had already started to branch out,
in February, with her website Badu World
Market, which offers merchandise — the
Badu vagina-scented incense immediately
sold out — and female-centered community.
She plans to launch an apothecary line
there next, and she’s taking classes to learn
how to code.
In a recent video interview from her liv-
ing room (thronelike chair from India, D.J.
setup, a Nefertiti sculpture wearing sun-
glasses and headphones, a fireplace with an
eternal flame), Badu described her vision
for a new livestream company. She ate din-
ner during the conversation, which started
with dessert, a homemade lemon-lime-
agave Popsicle. And she showed off the
notebooks that she uses to catalog her
ideas: a black Moleskin, and another, re-
plete with color-coded tabs, that was a vin-
tage spelling book. “Because what I’m do-
ing is, I’m casting spells, girl.”
The following are edited excerpts from
the conversation.
How did you come up with this idea?
First thing we had to figure out was, what
am I, besides this touring artist? And I
quickly found out that I was many more
things. It all came simple to me really
quickly, as if I had been downloading the
program through the Matrix.
Take me through the technical setup.
I didn’t want to just put a phone on a tripod. I
had to keep up my team’s morale and keep
them employed. I wanted the user to be able
to interactively choose which songs we
sing. When you’re in the studio, you’re per-
fecting a moment — you get to go back and
fix it. But when you’re doing something live,
you’re creating a moment and delivering it
at once, and I wanted the audience to feel
like their money not only got them into the
show, but they also got to help create the
moment.
I had to get a truck to broaden the band-
width of my house. All the neighbors had
high-speed internet for a couple of weeks
because of it. I was the director, the
producer, the music director, co-technical
director, and I was also the switcher. I had a
little iPad on the side switching camera an-
gles as I went. We had four cameras. [Cam-
era] A was right in front of me. B was behind
me on a tripod that could swivel left and
right. C was right above the whole group,
like a good bubble-eyed viewpoint, and then
there was one on the musicians and singers.
I can tell you like directing.
I’ve been directing since I was 3. First it was
the teddy bears. Then it was the neighbor
kids. Then it was the kids in the church.
What’s the status of your plan to start a
livestream company?
My livestream company project is very
much underway. It’s ambitious, but I think I
can do it. I think I can help artists build a
platform very similar to mine where every-
thing lives there. We are driving all the traf-
fic to our socials, to our chat rooms, to our
merchandise, and to our art, whether it’s
performance art or comedy or visual art or
fashion.
I’m also trying to convince the user or the
audience that it’s OK to pay the artist di-
rectly. Because they’re so used to using the
streaming services to do that, and we onlyLIVESTREAMING IN 2020Erykah Badu Is Blazing a New Trail
By MELENA RYZIK
When the Covid-
shutdown hit the music
industry, an artist who
has never taken the
conventional route started
rethinking how she would
produce, play and interact
with fans at concerts: ‘It all
came simple to me really
quickly, as if I had been
downloading the program
through the Matrix.’