Can’t Make the Concert? Livestreamers Are Coming to the Rescue.

As his audience has grown on Instagram, so has his ambition to move beyond megastars. Recently, he’s begun streaming shows of pop up-and-comers like Muna and Reneé Rapp. “I want to introduce people to folks they may not know,” he said.

Morgan Lee had been standing in the hot desert sun for 12 hours to secure a near-perfect view of Frank Ocean’s 2023 headlining performance at Coachella — a performance she was starting to fear wouldn’t even happen.

The artist was an hour late, and YouTube had canceled its livestream of the set — the only viewing option for fans unable to afford the festival’s $549 tickets (fees not included). When, finally, Ocean stepped onto the stage, Lee, 18 and from North Carolina, pulled out her phone. “I knew people would want to see this,” she said.

By the night’s end, hundreds of thousands of people had hopped onto Lee’s livestream — at its peak, 125,000 people were on simultaneously. Her Instagram account grew from 6,000 to 60,000 followers, her name trended on Twitter and Lee was crowned a hero by fans across the internet.

The viral moment changed her life: In June, she leveraged her newfound social media audience to release a debut music video and, a few weeks later, she was taken off the wait-list at N.Y.U.’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music (“the closest thing one could get to going to pop star school,” she said).

Lee, who is now in her first year at N.Y.U., described the event as a happy accident. Still, her prime view of the Coachella stage at the Ocean concert, which helped popularize her stream over others, was more a product of her devotion to the artist she loves than luck. Since she was a young teen, Lee has been concert camping — waiting for hours, or days, to get as close to the stage as possible.