A few months ago, I found myself responsible for booking live entertainment across three casino properties. Before then, my understanding of live music was probably no different from anyone else’s. I would go out, listen to a band, enjoy the evening and, if someone asked what I thought, I’d usually answer with a sentence or two about the music itself. The singer was strong. The guitarist was impressive. The band had good chemistry. Occasionally I’d comment on the atmosphere, but if I’m being honest, I never really separated the two. Good music created a good atmosphere. It seemed like a fairly straightforward relationship.
Looking back now, I think I underestimated how many different versions of the same evening can exist.
The audience experiences one version. The performers experience another. The bartender notices things neither of them notice. The manager leaves with an entirely different impression again. Even the person booking the entertainment often finishes the night thinking about things that never crossed anyone else’s mind. None of these perspectives are wrong, but they rarely overlap as much as I assumed they would.
I didn’t realise this immediately. During my first few weeks, I approached bookings the way I imagine most people would. I watched promotional videos, listened to recordings, looked at photographs, compared prices and spoke with agencies about availability. If someone had asked me what made one act more appealing than another, I probably would have talked about experience, professionalism or musicianship. Those all seemed like reasonable criteria because, at the time, I still believed the performance itself was the product being purchased.
It took several weekends before I started questioning that assumption.
Not because a particular band was exceptionally good or exceptionally poor, but because of the conversations that followed after each performance. Once the equipment had been packed away and the guests had gone home, the venue continued talking about the evening in ways I hadn’t expected. A manager might mention that the room felt unusually energetic after the second set. Someone working in food and beverage would comment that people seemed to linger longer than usual instead of leaving after dinner. Bartenders would remember whether guests gathered around the stage or remained scattered throughout the room. Occasionally someone would mention that regular patrons had asked when a particular act would be back. Just as often, nobody mentioned the music at all.
That last observation stayed with me.
Nobody mentioned the music.
At least, not in the way I expected.
People spoke about the room. They spoke about the atmosphere. They spoke about energy, pacing and whether the evening simply felt enjoyable. Sometimes they couldn’t even explain why they preferred one weekend over another. They just knew that something had been different.
At first I dismissed those conversations as subjective. Hospitality is full of opinions, and it’s easy to mistake anecdotal observations for meaningful patterns. I assumed that if I watched enough performances the picture would eventually become clearer. Instead, the opposite happened. The more weekends passed, the less confident I became that I understood what I was actually evaluating.
There were evenings where I genuinely believed an act had done a remarkable job, only to hear surprisingly average feedback from staff over the following days. There were other nights where I walked away thinking the performance had been perfectly competent, only to discover that guests had been asking managers when the act would be returning. Neither reaction made much sense if musical ability was the primary factor separating successful performances from forgettable ones.
That was probably the point where my attention began drifting away from the stage.
Not completely. I still watched the performers, but I found myself becoming increasingly interested in everything surrounding them. I started paying attention to how people entered the room compared with how they left it. Whether conversations became louder because guests were enjoying themselves or because they were trying to compete with the music. Whether people looked towards the stage naturally or only when encouraged to do so. Whether staff seemed relaxed throughout the evening or spent most of the night responding to small frustrations that had nothing to do with the musicians themselves.
None of these things appeared on a contract.
They weren’t listed on promotional packages or agency websites. You couldn’t hear them in a demo recording or see them in a highlight reel uploaded to social media. Yet they seemed to influence how a venue remembered an evening just as much as the music itself.
I still don’t think I have a complete answer as to why.
In fact, the more I thought about it, the less interested I became in judging individual performers. What fascinated me instead was the gap between how musicians appeared to evaluate themselves and how venues quietly evaluated them afterwards. Those two conversations seemed to be taking place almost independently of one another, intersecting only occasionally and often without either side realising how much information had been lost along the way.
The more I observed that gap, the more I began to wonder whether the live entertainment industry had accidentally created a feedback problem. Not because anyone was deliberately withholding information, but because every person involved in a performance was looking for something slightly different. The audience wanted an enjoyable evening. The venue wanted guests to stay longer, return more often and leave with a positive impression of the property. Agencies wanted to place artists successfully and build long-term relationships. Performers wanted to deliver the best show they could. None of those goals conflicted with one another, yet they weren’t identical either.
Once I started looking at live entertainment through that lens, I found it increasingly difficult to watch a performance the way I used to.
For a while I wondered if I was simply overthinking it.
Hospitality is a subjective business. Every guest arrives with different expectations, different moods and different reasons for being there. Some are celebrating birthdays, some have just finished work, some are meeting friends they haven’t seen in months, while others simply wandered in because they heard music from across the gaming floor. Expecting one performance to satisfy every person in the room would be unrealistic. Perhaps what I was noticing was nothing more than the natural unpredictability of people.
That explanation was comforting because it suggested there wasn’t much to solve.
The more weekends passed, however, the harder it became to accept that randomness was the whole story. Certain patterns kept repeating themselves. There were acts that consistently left managers discussing when they could return, while others rarely generated much conversation after the evening ended. What interested me was that these patterns often emerged independently of musicianship. If I had lined some of these performers up in a rehearsal studio and judged them purely on technical ability, I doubt I would have predicted which ones would become venue favourites.
That raised a slightly uncomfortable question.
If technical ability wasn’t the strongest predictor of whether a venue wanted someone back, then what was?
The obvious answer would be experience, but I don’t think that’s sufficient either. Experience can certainly make someone a better performer, but it doesn’t necessarily make them a better fit for hospitality. I’ve met musicians with decades of experience who approach every venue exactly the same way, and I’ve seen relatively younger performers instinctively adapt themselves to the room they happen to be standing in. One approach isn’t inherently more professional than the other, but the difference in how guests respond can be surprisingly noticeable.
I began thinking about another profession entirely.
A chef.
Nobody judges a chef solely by whether they know how to cook. A technically flawless meal served at the wrong temperature, delivered twenty minutes late or completely mismatched to the restaurant’s atmosphere is still considered a poor dining experience. Hospitality has always understood that excellence depends on context. Food doesn’t exist independently from service, lighting, pacing or the environment surrounding it.
Music, I realised, often gets treated differently.
We separate the performance from everything around it, almost as though the songs exist in isolation from the room they’re filling. Yet from the guest’s perspective, those things are inseparable. They don’t remember the band as one experience and the venue as another. They remember the evening.
That distinction sounds subtle until you’re responsible for booking the next act.
If guests return because they enjoyed their evening, it becomes almost impossible to isolate exactly what they were responding to. Was it the music? The service? The company they were with? The atmosphere? The timing? Probably some combination of all of them. Hospitality has never been particularly good at separating those variables because, in reality, guests don’t experience them separately either.
Once I started thinking this way, another question kept coming back to me.
Who is a performer actually performing for?
The obvious answer is the audience, but I don’t think that’s entirely true. A performer is also performing for the venue, whether they realise it or not. They’re contributing to the identity of the space for that evening. They influence how long people stay, how comfortable they feel, whether conversations flourish or become strained, whether someone decides to order another drink or call it a night. Those outcomes aren’t entirely within the performer’s control, but neither are they completely outside it.
The interesting part is that venues rarely communicate in those terms.
When musicians receive feedback, it usually arrives in broad summaries. Great show. Thanks for coming. We’d love to have you back. Or, just as commonly, we’ll keep you in mind for future dates. Both responses are polite. Neither explains very much.
From the venue’s perspective, there often isn’t time to provide detailed analysis after every performance. There are invoices to process, schedules to build, staffing issues to solve and another weekend approaching faster than anyone would like. Detailed feedback becomes another task that quietly slips down the priority list.
That leaves performers in an unusual position.
They spend years refining an incredibly complex craft, yet the feedback they receive about that craft is often remarkably limited. Imagine asking an architect to improve while only telling them whether people liked the building. Imagine asking a photographer to become better while never explaining which images resonated or why. In almost every profession, meaningful improvement depends on meaningful feedback. Live entertainment is one of the few industries where some of the most valuable observations remain trapped inside casual conversations between venue staff long after the performers have loaded their equipment into the van.
I don’t think anyone intended to create that system. It simply evolved that way.
Agencies understandably focus on placing artists and maintaining relationships. Venues focus on running successful operations. Performers focus on delivering the best show they can. Everyone is doing their job, yet there are moments where those jobs overlap imperfectly. The information that could help everyone often becomes fragmented as it moves between those different groups.
The more I thought about this, the less interested I became in identifying “good” or “bad” acts. Those labels started to feel too simplistic. Instead, I found myself paying attention to something much harder to define.
Presence.
Not stage presence in the traditional sense, but an awareness of the room itself.
Some performers seem unusually sensitive to subtle shifts in the atmosphere. They notice when conversations begin to overpower the music. They recognise when a dance floor needs another ten minutes before changing tempo. They instinctively understand when the audience wants interaction and when they simply want the soundtrack to an enjoyable evening. It’s difficult to describe because it rarely announces itself. In fact, the best examples often go unnoticed precisely because everything feels so natural.
Only after watching enough performances did I begin to appreciate how rare that ability actually is.
The more I watched performances, the more I realised I had spent years asking the wrong question.
Whenever someone recommended a band, the conversation almost always revolved around whether they were “good.” It sounds like a sensible question because it’s easy to understand. We ask the same thing about restaurants, films and books. Is it good? Would you recommend it? The problem is that “good” becomes a surprisingly vague word once you start looking beyond the stage.
A musician might define a good performance by how accurately the songs were played, how well the vocals held up over three hours or how responsive the audience appeared. A venue manager may never consciously think about any of those things. They are watching whether guests remain engaged throughout the evening, whether the room feels inviting rather than chaotic, whether the entertainment complements the venue rather than competing with it. Neither definition is more valid than the other, but they are measuring different outcomes.
It reminds me of something that happens in marketing.
A beautifully designed advertisement means very little if it fails to achieve its objective. Conversely, a campaign that isn’t particularly memorable from a creative standpoint may still outperform every expectation because it quietly connects with the right audience. The industry learned a long time ago that creativity and effectiveness are related, but they are not interchangeable. I have started wondering whether live entertainment suffers from the same misconception. Technical excellence undoubtedly contributes to a successful evening, but it does not guarantee one.
One of the first habits I developed without even noticing was spending less time watching the performers and more time watching everyone else.
At first that felt almost disrespectful. The musicians had spent years developing their craft, yet here I was observing a couple seated near the back of the room or watching how quickly servers were moving between tables. Eventually I realised that those observations were often more revealing than anything happening on stage.
A room has a rhythm that exists independently of the music.
People arrive cautiously. They order drinks, find their seats and settle into conversation. There is usually a period where nobody is paying much attention to the entertainment because the evening hasn’t found its pace yet. Then, almost without warning, something shifts. Conversations become livelier. People begin looking towards the stage more frequently. Others start moving closer. The room feels as though it has collectively decided that the night has begun.
The interesting part is that this shift doesn’t always happen during the most technically impressive song.
Sometimes it occurs during an uncomplicated cover that everyone knows. Sometimes it happens because the performer reads the room well enough to slow things down rather than speed them up. Occasionally it has nothing to do with the music itself. A brief interaction with a guest, an unscripted moment between band members or a simple acknowledgement of the audience can alter the atmosphere in ways that are difficult to explain afterwards.
Those moments rarely appear in promotional videos.
Highlight reels naturally showcase the loudest applause, the biggest crowds and the strongest vocals because those things are easy to capture visually. They make sense from a marketing perspective. If I were promoting a band, I’d probably do exactly the same thing.
The difficulty is that they don’t necessarily show what a venue is trying to evaluate.
A three-minute video can demonstrate musical ability remarkably well. It struggles to demonstrate whether a performer understands pacing over an entire evening. It can’t show how they respond when the room is quieter than expected or when guests are more interested in conversation than dancing. It certainly doesn’t reveal how they treat staff during setup, whether they adapt when something goes wrong or how comfortable they are performing for twenty people instead of two hundred.
Those things only become visible after spending several hours in the same room.
That observation also changed the way I thought about agencies.
Before becoming involved in bookings, I quietly assumed agencies knew everything there was to know about the artists they represented. Looking back, that expectation was unfair. Agencies know an enormous amount about availability, professionalism, pricing, technical requirements and previous experience. They often know their artists far better than a venue ever will.
What they cannot realistically know is how every artist interacts with every room.
No one can.
A performance doesn’t exist in isolation. It emerges from the relationship between the people on stage, the audience in front of them and the environment surrounding both. Change any one of those variables and the evening changes with it.
The same band can leave one venue with guests asking when they’re coming back and leave another venue feeling as though something never quite connected. That doesn’t necessarily mean the performance improved or declined overnight. It may simply mean the chemistry between performer, audience and environment was different.
That thought stayed with me because it challenged another assumption I had carried into the role.
I used to believe venues hired bands.
Now I’m not entirely convinced that’s true.
I think venues hire outcomes.
Sometimes those outcomes involve a packed dance floor. Sometimes they involve creating a relaxed atmosphere where guests linger over dinner instead of rushing through it. Sometimes they involve attracting a loyal group of regulars who plan their weekends around particular performers. The music is obviously central to all of those experiences, but the objective extends beyond the music itself.
Once I started framing entertainment in those terms, I found myself asking a different question after every performance.
Not “Was the band good?”
Instead:
“What kind of evening did they create?”
The distinction is subtle, but I suspect it explains why certain acts remain in demand year after year while others, despite possessing every technical skill one could ask for, struggle to establish long-term relationships with venues.
The answer may have less to do with the songs they play than the environment they leave behind once the final note has faded.
The more I reflected on these weekends, the more I found myself thinking about something that had very little to do with music.
Hospitality.
It’s a word that rarely appears in conversations about local live entertainment, yet almost every venue ultimately operates within the hospitality industry. Whether it’s a casino, restaurant, hotel, neighbourhood pub or private club, people aren’t simply purchasing entertainment. They’re purchasing an evening. Live music happens to be one of the ingredients, but it isn’t the meal itself.
That distinction matters because hospitality rewards a very different set of skills than performance alone.
If someone walks into a venue intending to spend three or four hours there, everything contributes to how they remember the experience. The greeting at the entrance, the speed of service, the lighting, the food, the people they’re with, the conversations they have and, of course, the music. Guests don’t separate those experiences into neat categories when they leave. They simply decide whether they enjoyed the night.
As obvious as that sounds, I don’t think I fully appreciated what it meant until I started evaluating entertainment from the venue’s perspective.
A musician naturally focuses on the stage because that’s where their responsibility begins and ends. A venue doesn’t have that luxury. The stage is only one part of a much larger system that has to function together. If the entertainment dominates the room to the point where nobody can comfortably speak to one another, some guests will leave frustrated. If the energy never develops, the room feels lifeless regardless of how well the songs were played. If the music is technically excellent but disconnected from the mood of the audience, the evening can still feel strangely unsatisfying.
None of those outcomes necessarily reflect poor musicianship.
They reflect something else.
I’ve struggled to find the right word for it.
Awareness perhaps.
Not awareness of one’s own performance, but awareness of everyone else’s experience.
There were evenings where I noticed performers paying remarkable attention to the room around them. They weren’t constantly speaking to the audience or trying to dominate the evening. In fact, they often did less. They recognised when people were deeply engaged in conversation and resisted the temptation to interrupt every few minutes. They sensed when the room was ready for more energy rather than assuming it from the beginning. Their confidence seemed to come from trusting the evening rather than forcing it.
At first, I thought this was simply experience.
I’m no longer convinced.
I’ve seen experienced performers who approached every venue with exactly the same formula regardless of who happened to be sitting in front of them. I’ve also seen performers with fewer years behind them display an almost instinctive understanding of how to adapt without making it obvious.
That made me wonder whether adaptability is something we underestimate in live entertainment.
Musicians spend years refining consistency, and rightly so. Audiences expect songs to sound familiar, harmonies to remain tight and performances to be reliable. Yet hospitality rewards another kind of consistency altogether. Not consistency of execution, but consistency of outcome. Guests should leave feeling that they had a memorable evening, even if the path to creating that feeling changes from one crowd to the next.
Those are very different objectives.
One asks, “Can you perform this song the same way every night?”
The other asks, “Can you create the same feeling even when every audience is different?”
I suspect that difference explains why some performers become almost impossible to replace within certain venues.
It’s tempting to assume that venue loyalty develops because a performer has become popular, but popularity often feels like the consequence rather than the cause. The venues I’ve observed don’t repeatedly book artists simply because they attract applause. They book them because they’ve become predictable in the best possible sense. Management knows roughly what the room will feel like by the end of the evening. Staff know what to expect. Regular guests begin associating particular nights with a certain atmosphere. Over time, the performer stops being viewed as external entertainment and gradually becomes part of the venue’s identity.
That transformation is fascinating because it happens so quietly.
Nobody announces it.
No award is given.
One day a performer is simply another booking on the calendar. A year later, guests begin asking whether they’ll be returning next month.
I’ve started wondering whether that’s one of the clearest indicators of success in local entertainment.
Not whether people applaud loudly at the end of the night.
Whether they miss you when you’re not there.
That thought stayed with me because it’s very different from how many performers naturally measure progress. Musicians often look for bigger stages, larger audiences and more visible signs of success. Those ambitions are perfectly understandable, but they can sometimes overshadow a quieter achievement that venues value enormously: becoming someone whose absence is noticed.
That kind of relationship can’t be built through talent alone.
It emerges through familiarity, trust and consistency over time. Guests gradually begin recognising the performer as part of their routine. Staff know how they work. Management no longer wonders whether the evening will succeed because previous experience has already answered that question.
Looking back, I think I underestimated the value of reducing uncertainty.
When I first started booking entertainment, I imagined that every decision revolved around finding the most impressive act available within the budget. I now suspect that many decisions are really about confidence.
Not confidence in the sense of stage presence.
Confidence that the evening will unfold the way everyone hopes it will.
Those are not the same thing.
A venue isn’t just hiring musicians.
It’s making a promise to its guests about the kind of evening they can expect.
Every booking is, in a small way, a decision about trust.
And perhaps that’s why conversations after performances rarely revolve around technical mistakes. Staff already assume a certain level of competence. Once that threshold has been crossed, the discussion naturally shifts towards everything else that determines whether people enjoyed spending several hours in the room.
I’ve gradually come to believe that this “everything else” is where the real craft of live entertainment begins.
One question kept following me throughout those first few months.
Why do some acts eventually become part of a venue while others remain visitors?
It’s an odd question because, on paper, every booking is temporary. A band arrives, sets up, performs for a few hours, packs their equipment and leaves. Yet over time certain performers begin occupying a different place in people’s minds. Guests ask whether they’ll be back next month. Staff know them by name. Managers feel comfortable scheduling them months in advance because they already have a reasonable idea of how the evening will unfold.
Somewhere along the way they stop feeling like external entertainment.
They become part of the venue itself.
I don’t think that transition happens because they’re necessarily the most talented musicians available.
If that were true, every venue would constantly replace local acts with increasingly accomplished performers until eventually only the most technically gifted musicians remained. That obviously isn’t how the industry works. The same performers continue receiving bookings year after year despite new bands appearing constantly. Something other than technical ability is creating that loyalty.
Initially I assumed it had something to do with familiarity. People naturally enjoy what they recognise. There’s certainly some truth to that. Regular guests often look forward to seeing performers they’ve enjoyed before, just as they might return to a favourite restaurant because they know what to expect.
The more I thought about it, however, the less convincing that explanation became.
Familiarity doesn’t explain why someone becomes familiar in the first place.
There has to be something happening before that relationship develops.
I started paying attention to performers long before they began playing.
That probably sounds strange, but the evening doesn’t begin when the first song starts.
It begins during setup.
Most guests never notice this because they’re still arriving, ordering drinks or talking with friends. Venue staff notice everything.
How equipment is brought in.
How performers interact with servers trying to prepare the room.
Whether setup creates unnecessary stress.
How they speak to technicians.
Whether they introduce themselves to management.
None of these moments have anything to do with music.
Yet they quietly establish the tone for the rest of the evening.
It reminded me of something I’d seen repeatedly in other industries.
People often separate professionalism from talent as though they’re unrelated qualities. In reality, professionalism shapes how talent is experienced. An exceptionally skilled photographer who consistently misses deadlines will eventually be remembered for unreliability rather than creativity. A brilliant chef who cannot work with kitchen staff becomes increasingly difficult to employ regardless of how impressive the food might be.
Entertainment isn’t much different.
A venue doesn’t only remember the three hours someone spends on stage.
It remembers the six hours surrounding them.
The arrival.
The setup.
The interactions with staff.
The flexibility when something changes unexpectedly.
The willingness to adjust.
The departure.
Only then does the evening become a memory.
That observation gradually changed another assumption I’d carried into this role.
For years I’d heard musicians describe getting booked as though it were a competition.
Who has the better vocalist?
Who has the tighter harmonies?
Who has the stronger repertoire?
Those things absolutely matter, but I’m no longer convinced they’re where most long-term booking decisions are made.
More often, I suspect venues ask themselves a much quieter question.
“How easy was this evening?”
It’s an interesting question because guests would never think to ask it.
Managers do.
An evening where the room feels relaxed, staff aren’t constantly solving avoidable problems, guests leave happy and everyone finishes the night feeling as though things simply worked tends to linger positively in people’s memories. Ironically, the smoother an evening becomes, the less anyone notices the countless small decisions that contributed to it.
Hospitality is full of invisible successes.
Nobody congratulates the restaurant because the reservation system functioned correctly.
Nobody thanks housekeeping because the room was clean.
Nobody applauds a server for remembering an order without writing it down.
People simply notice when those things don’t happen.
Live entertainment often works the same way.
Guests rarely leave saying, “That band understood exactly how much interaction the room wanted.”
Instead they leave saying,
“That was a really enjoyable night.”
The performer disappears into the experience.
Oddly enough, I think that’s one of the highest compliments hospitality can offer.
In many artistic fields, the goal is to become the centre of attention. Hospitality often rewards the opposite. The best performers know when to occupy the foreground and when to quietly support everything else taking place around them. They understand that they aren’t competing with conversation, food, celebrations or the venue itself. They’re contributing to them.
That difference sounds philosophical until you start comparing weekends.
I’ve watched performers chase applause after every song, stretching the space between sets because audience interaction felt like success. I’ve also watched performers move almost effortlessly through an evening, barely interrupting the natural rhythm of the room, allowing conversations, laughter and music to coexist without competing for attention.
The second approach rarely feels as dramatic.
It often produces a better night.
That made me reconsider something I’d believed for years.
I’d always assumed stage presence meant commanding a room.
Now I wonder if the better definition is understanding it.
They’re not the same thing.
One demands attention.
The other earns trust.
I suspect trust lasts much longer.
There was another assumption that I didn’t realise I was carrying until quite a bit later.
I had always thought venues hired entertainment because they wanted music. Even writing that sentence now feels almost embarrassingly obvious. Of course they want music. Why else would they be paying a band to stand on a stage for three hours?
The problem was that I kept running into observations that didn’t quite fit that explanation.
If music alone explained booking decisions, then technically stronger musicians should gradually dominate the local industry. Over enough years the market should naturally reward whoever plays better, sings better or performs with greater precision. That’s how we tend to imagine merit working. The better product eventually wins.
Yet that wasn’t what I was seeing.
Some of the acts that generated the strongest reactions weren’t necessarily the ones I would have described as the strongest musicians if you had asked me to judge them purely from rehearsal footage or a studio recording. Equally, there were performers whose musical ability I admired enormously but who somehow never seemed to create the same impression once they were placed into a hospitality environment.
For a while I blamed the room.
Then I blamed demographics.
Then I wondered whether song selection simply mattered more than I had assumed.
Each explanation worked for a weekend or two before another performance came along that contradicted it.
That was probably the point where I stopped trying to find a single explanation altogether.
I’ve become increasingly suspicious of simple explanations.
Most interesting systems don’t usually have one variable. They have dozens of small variables nudging one another in directions that only become obvious when viewed together. Hospitality feels like one of those systems.
Music is obviously part of it.
Service is part of it.
Lighting is part of it.
Food matters.
The people sitting together matter.
Even something as ordinary as where guests happen to be seated can change the way a room feels.
Trying to isolate music from everything else started feeling a little like trying to determine whether the steering wheel is the most important part of a car. The question itself misses the point because nothing meaningful happens in isolation.
That line of thinking led me somewhere I wasn’t expecting.
I realised I had quietly been treating bands as though they were products.
Book them.
Experience them.
Evaluate them.
Replace them if necessary.
Hospitality doesn’t really work like that.
A performance isn’t inserted into a venue the way a television is placed on a shelf. It interacts with everything already happening there. The same band can feel completely different depending on whether people have arrived to celebrate, unwind after work, watch a hockey game or simply pass the evening. None of those guests asked the entertainment to become the centre of their night, yet the entertainment inevitably becomes part of how they remember it.
That probably explains why I found myself watching guests more often than performers.
Not because the stage had become less interesting.
Quite the opposite.
I think I was unconsciously trying to understand where the performance actually existed.
Was it on the stage?
Or was it somewhere between the stage and everyone listening?
I’m still not entirely sure.