PROVO – If all goes as planned this Saturday, Shaun Barrowes and 900 of his musician friends will perform an Easter-themed concert in Provo for 2 million people.
With no traffic jams and no need for crowd control.
And oh yeah, it’s free.
How this is possible – hosting a musical festival five times as large as Woodstock with zero security and virtually no expense – is a tribute to technology, the reach of social media, the wealth of musical talent in Utah willing to participate and provide service at no charge, and, most of all, to Shaun Barrowes’ ingenuity.
The former American Idol participant (he won a golden ticket to Hollywood in 2007 as one of 30 finalists) dreamed this one up all on his own.
All the concert's performers will be live, while the audience members will tune in remotely from all over the world.
The Easter concert is an outgrowth of the live streaming webcasts, including Unsung Heroes and Spidey Beats, that Barrowes has been presenting two to three times a week the past couple of years from Rock Canyon Studios in Provo – shows he performs with various other musicians that reach as many as 150,000 weekly viewers worldwide via Facebook.
The burgeoning popularity of these free broadcasts – fueled by the viral wildfire of social media – got Shaun to thinking: what if he got hundreds of musicians together and they all spread the word about the upcoming Easter concert through their social networks? How many viewers might they be able to collectively attract?
He reached out to a number of groups, acts and choirs. By the time he was finished, in addition to performers such as Rhyme Time, Austin Craig, Stephen Jones, Working With Lemons, Missy Lynn, Junior Maile, Amber Lynn Stoppel, Ashley Hess, Nadia Khristean, Monica Moore Smith, LDS Smile, Angela Winston, Rob Landes, Firefly and Noteworthy, he had several large choirs signed up, including One Voice Children’s Choir, Debra Bonner Unity Gospel Choir, Utah Valley Children’s Choir, the American Heritage Youth Chorus and American International School of Utah Choirs.
At various times on Saturday, these performers will show up at Rock Canyon Studios for hour-long shows scheduled for 10 a.m., noon, 2 p.m. and 4 p.m.
That’s the plan.
They’ll sing about forgiveness, repentance, compassion, faith, prayer, hope, gratitude and God’s word.
With the hashtag: #PrinceofPeace.
The goal: to average half-a-million viewers for each segment, totaling 2 million viewers when all is said and done.
“I think we can do it,” says Shaun hopefully. “We won’t know until we try.”
For Shaun, who describes his musical niche as “Michael Buble meets John Legend,” innovation has long been a part of his act. He started booking his own tours and promoting his own brand in 2005, not long after returning to Utah County after serving a two-year LDS mission.
“You can sing all day long in your basement hoping somebody will discover you, but your odds of that happening are about the same as winning the lottery, and probably less,” he says. “You have to be as creative on the business and marketing side of things as the music side of things.”
His visibility grew in 2007 after his American Idol stint. After that he added a national songwriting award and an Emmy nomination, further strengthening his niche.
These days, in between his semiweekly free live streams, he tours regularly in the U.S. and Europe and performs for a variety of causes, including Wounded Warriors, the Alzheimer's Association and groups fighting sex trafficking.
His motivation to do the Easter show relates directly to how joining those good fights makes him feel.
“To me, service is everything,” he says. “Regardless of your religion, the true source of joy comes from forgetting yourself and serving other people.”
There will be no mention of specific religions in Saturday’s “Easter Woodstock,” nor will there be any charge for admission.
“We want this to be very unifying, very inspiring, to everybody,” says Shaun.
The live stream shows can be accessed by typing “Shaun Barrowes Easter Unsung Heroes” into a search engine or by visiting this link.