There have been free weekly Nugs webcasts from New Orleans groove epicenter Tipitina’s, Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh’s jam headquarters Terrapin Crossroads, and numerous nights from Metallica’s recent European tour, along with every Dead & Co stop. Nugs assisted Kanye West with a Sunday Service from the Forum in L.A. and, over Labor Day, were live with the Raconteurs at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville. “The Raconteurs let us into the dressing room pre-show and we livestreamed some great footage of the band goofing around as they walked onto the stage every night,” Serling says. They’ve also worked with Wilco, Jason Isbell, and Eric Clapton’s Crossroads Guitar Festival.

Beyond the Nugs multiverse, fans can regularly tune into streams direct from the Ryman (where the Grand Ole Opry virtually invented livestreaming on 50,000-watt AM radio in the 1920s), Buddy Guy’s Legends in Chicago, or Bob Weir’s Sweetwater Music Hall in Mill Valley, California. With festivals like Coachella, Bonnaroo, Farm Aid, and Lollapalooza offering streams almost every year, alongside countless Tiny Desk Concerts and Boiler Room-like set-ups for small acts and DJs, live music on the internet is flourishing like never before. One way to keep up is by watching JamBase’s Couch Tour Alerts, where fans could find free streams by Sleater-Kinney, Vampire Weekend, Brittany Howard, Jim James and Teddy Abrams, and others last fall. And while not every streaming site offers chat capabilities, active fan communities are often just a search or two away on Twitter or Facebook.

Since 2016, Amy Sheridan has maintained a daily schedule of Couch Tour listings posted to Facebook as well as her own site Fangeist, and in the wake of coronavirus she’ll soon be providing the same service to CBS properties. “I probably have made no less than 100 new friends and acquaintances in the last 13 years I have been on Facebook, getting to know people all over the world while listening to our favorite music together,” she notes by email. “Many of them I have gone on to meet at the respective bands’ concerts face-to-face and they become actual real-life friends.”

If there is such a thing as a global live music community, Couch Tour is a portal to it, populated by eager listeners who may have been home-bound even before the arrival of coronavirus. “My sister had a baby around the time that I started making these listings, and I thought about the fact that so many new parents couldn’t attend the Phish shows, or whatever band they love,” Sheridan says.

The secondary audience for livestreams is also enormous. Though Serling notes that Nugs’ biggest in-the-moment viewership was 181,000 watching Phish at the LOCKN’ festival in 2016, an estimated 3.8 million worldwide viewed the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ spring 2019 performance at the base of the Great Pyramid in Egypt within 48 hours of the webcast. Between official platforms like Qello and the taper-built BitTorrent network of video and audio, there are limitless possibilities for a time-displaced Couch Tour, where fans sync up to watch archival videos together.

Taken as a global patchwork of events, the Couch Tour might be seen as an ongoing, genre-spanning mega-festival that resembles a virtual Bonnaroo. While bigger acts have used livestream ventures to supplement ticketing and merchandise profits, others have employed it as a method of free promotion, akin to the way FM broadcasts functioned in the ’70s. For fans who can’t make it out to shows as much they’d like, the free offerings can also double as a way to discover artists.

Via platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitch, Couch Tour has created a circuit all its own, allowing musicians to nurture dedicated fans who may never have actually seen them live. Over the past year, bluegrass guitar phenom Billy Strings has built a following with the help of frequent and constantly changing performances, streamed for free. “Mixlr attendance started with 20, 30 people per show and now it’s grown to 600-plus people per show,” Strings says. “The video livestreaming has seen upwards of 7,000 per show... To be able to share musical space, whether online or in person, is the kind of connectivity that we need to keep at the forefront of our lives.”

The missing piece, though, seems to be how to make Couch Tour a functional source of income for a wider range of artists when going on actual tour becomes harder than ever, with or without global pandemics. The sudden explosion of livestreaming has revealed a number of options for artists, including using Patreon to broadcast to paying subscribers. But so far, nothing has reached a consensus in terms of providing a durable DIY platform for musicians to stream their own for-profit events. Even when musicians can perform live again, a functional platform allowing artists to quickly organize their own profitable streaming appearances would be an extraordinarily useful tool.

In the days since self-quarantine began, the spirit of Couch Tour has virtually gone mainstream, with livestreams coming from John Legend, Death Cab For Cutie’s Ben Gibbard, Coldplay’s Chris Martin, and Neil Young (who has previously streamed shows via his subscription Neil Young Archives site). Nugs has been working on audience-free webcasts live from several cities. Cafe Oto in London and other venues have hosted crowdless shows, and hopefully more will continue to do so.

Though the post-streaming music industry has been difficult for professional musicians at nearly all levels, the emergence of Couch Tour as a potentially viable income source might be one of the few positive developments in recent years. For now, it may be the perfect activity for a homebound age, both socially present and physically distant. But long after audiences return to venues, the future of Couch Tour will be something to watch.