Concerts are getting more spectacular. Live-events company Solotech is capitalizing on the glam | Canada Voices

Justin Timberlake is only half the main attraction on his Forget Tomorrow world tour, which launched last year in Vancouver and has swung through Montreal and Toronto. As he and his Tennessee Kids backing band and dancers bounce through hits such as My Love and Señorita, the audience’s eyes tend to fixate on the monolith that routinely emerges from the arena-wide screen behind him.

Fully covered in LED video screens, the multistorey rectangular structure is at once a multimedia augmentation for the concert and a kind of dance partner for Timberlake. It tilts over the performers, at times floats above the crowd. It can appear transparent or full of liquid, or contain a virtual doppelganger of the headliner himself. For the grand finale of Mirrors, Timberlake emerges singing atop the 65,000-pound rig as it tilts and hovers above the crowd, LED screens ablaze, suspended by cables but appearing to defy gravity.

Those video screens and their back-end technology were made by Montreal’s Groupe Solotech Inc. This kind of extravagance is now considered routine at major arena concerts, where crowds expect to get a multimedia bang for the ever-increasing number of bucks that entry requires.

The live-music sector has for many decades been supported by a cottage industry of concert-technology companies to give shows an added splash. These days, outfits such as Solotech have become an integral – and lucrative – part of the concert experience.

“The complexity of the spectacle has grown, and it’s driven by technology – and what technology can do to enhance the artistic offering,” said Martin Carrier, Solotech’s president of global media and entertainment technologies, during a tour of the company’s former Montreal warehouse.

Since the post-Napster collapse of physical music sales – even today, when artists make fractions of pennies per digital stream – concert tours have become musicians’ predominant income source. Among the biggest stars, this has resulted in longer and more extravagant tours with increasingly record-setting revenue: Coldplay last year surged past Elton John to bring in nearly US$1-billion on its latest tour, according to Billboard Boxscore’s industry tracking, while the data company Pollstar estimates that the biggest of them all, Taylor Swift, pulled in more than US$2-billion with her globetrotting Eras Tour.

Solotech’s bet on this era’s increasing concert complexity has been a winning one. The privately held company says its annual revenue has grown fourfold since 2017, from $170-million then to $650-million. Beyond Timberlake, its tech has boosted recent tours by the likes of P!nk and Michael Bublé.

The company also rents more standard audio-visual equipment from its many global hubs. But it’s being increasingly recognized for spectacles, be they in houses of worship, such as the audio system in the world’s biggest Gothic cathedral in the U.K.; many facets of London’s ABBA Voyage virtual concert experience; and even on Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour. (Solotech staff are prevented by Team Taylor from saying what exactly their role was on the massive multiyear tour.)

Carrier says that Solotech is profitable. While you have to take privately held companies at their word with that kind of thing, the minority investment announced by Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec a year and a half ago is probably pretty good evidence. Claridge Inc., Desjardins Capital and Investissement Québec are long-time investors, too. Now Solotech is pushing for $1-billion in annual revenue, including through acquisitions (10 since 2018), boosting sales, integrating their many audio and visual offerings, and expanding to new markets.

Solotech is one of a group of Canadian companies trying to enhance concert experiences worldwide, alongside compatriots including PixMob (which makes song-syncing LED wearables such as wristbands and necklaces for the likes of Coldplay and Bad Bunny) and Toronto stage-lighting company Christie Lites.

There’s a cost to all this spectacle, of course, and one way it’s traceable is in Solotech’s surging income. Concerts, especially arena- and stadium-sized ones, are getting more expensive, drawing the ire of consumers who often feel left out. Some of this is owing to scalping and secondary-market sales. Some of this, especially for artists whose reach has the magnitude of Swift or Beyoncé, comes down to sheer demand. And some of this is because of the enormous cost of putting on concerts – including spending on non-musical experiences, such as audio-visual tech.

In Carrier and Solotech’s view, this presents a chicken-and-egg situation: Yes, more sophisticated AV can add to costs, but consumers already frustrated with high costs expect high production. “It’s probably a circular answer,” Carrier said.

Catherine Moore, an adjunct professor at the University of Toronto who’s spent many years studying the music business, sees multiple factors converging. As the age-old dilemma of accommodating the furthest-flung fans in big venues meets the rise of the experience economy, people expect to be entertained by more than just the music itself.

She pointed to the rise of general admission, sometimes seat-free tickets to baseball games, such as those offered at the Rogers Centre’s Outfield District – where one can bear witness to the Toronto Blue Jays but indulge in broader amenities. “It’s all part of a larger, not necessarily music-specific desire by people to have an experience,” Moore said.

This expectation of theatrics in concerts, meanwhile, can be traced back to the boundary-pushing self-brinksmanship of U2, said Alan Cross, the long-time broadcaster, music historian and music-tech consultant. U2’s early-1990s Zoo TV tour featured dozens of rapidly changing screens and East German Trabant cars, plus live satellite transmissions.

Their productions kept getting bigger, from the mega-arch of the PopMart tour in the late 1990s to the massive claw-shaped stage of the U2 360° tour at the turn of the 2010s. When Las Vegas opened up the US$2.3-billion Sphere venue – featuring a 160,000-square-foot wraparound LED display – U2 was its first performer.

It’s a culmination of decades of trying to satiate ever-hungrier audiences. “People are expecting theatrics, spectacle, special effects, lasers, lights and big screens,” Cross said. It may also represent the industry’s next existential crisis.

“Now the problem is that there seems to be a bit of an arms race. How big and spectacular can we make a concert while still keeping ticket prices reasonably reasonable?” If you’re one of the millions of artists with a smaller-than-stadium-sized following, Cross said, this could make it even harder than it already is to tour in a postlockdown world. “Is all the concert money going to go to upper-tier bands that can afford spectacle?”

Solotech’s target market is that upper tier, and it’s still trying to win over bigger chunks of the concert and live-event industries by constantly finding new answers to a single question: “What have we not seen before?” Carrier posited the question after spending 45 minutes walking through the old Solotech warehouse, among the colour-coded road cases filled with lighting, audio and networking technology, as technicians in steel-toed boots tweaked LEDs and packed more cases.

Solotech was co-founded in 1977 by Denis Lefrançois and André Riendeau after Lefrançois oversaw audio at the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal. It immediately began growing by acquisition, and over the next few decades took on clients including Celine Dion and Cirque du Soleil as it expanded into lighting and video.

These days it’s a nearly 2,000-person operation, not just from Montreal (which employs more than 600), but from hubs that now include Nashville, Macau and London. The reach has become massive: When Adele held a 10-show residency in Munich last summer, Solotech was the official video supplier, and collaborated with partners to build the 5,000-square-metre LED screen wall in the custom-built venue. As Carrier spoke with The Globe and Mail, that screen had been disassembled and was crossing the Atlantic Ocean back to the warehouse.

By handling an increasing amount of logistics – audio, video, lighting, rigging, setup – into “360″ packages, Solotech is able to deepen its relationship with concert clients. Even when Solotech isn’t the sole technology provider, its efforts can be massive.

When Timberlake’s tour crossed back into Canada last October, 14 to 16 of the 28 trucks that came with him carried Solotech gear, said Lee Moro, the Windsor-born, Nashville-based senior vice-president of live productions at Solotech US, who oversaw its work on the tour. While the monolith’s main rig was designed by the Pennsylvania-based Tait Group, Solotech was still the “360″ provider of AV services.

“When I go see a show, and I don’t think about production and I don’t think about technology, that’s because it’s really good,” Moro said by phone from Miami, where he was keeping an eye on Solotech’s unnamed contribution to Swift’s Eras tour concerts there.

Solotech is gambling on fans wanting more and more of this invisible-but-exciting complexity with time. “It’s a logistical ballet,” Carrier said, but “there’s really no going back.”