When Keith Urban played a secret, invite-only concert for Vanderbilt University medical personnel back in May, he wasn’t greeted by scads of screaming, dancing fans holding up lighters or cell phones. Instead, the country star performed in front of 125 cars at the Stardust Drive-In Theatre in Watertown, Tenn.

“The only real challenge for me was [the absence of] the energy from a mosh pit,” Urban told Variety. “But the car horns, the flashing headlights – that was crazy cool.”

Keith Urban was the first major artist to hold a drive-in concert during the coronavirus pandemic, performing at a surprise concert for medical professionals in Tennessee back in May.

Urban was the first major artists to jump on the “drive-in concert” trend, but he won’t be the last, as musicians and event organizers scramble to reinvent live music in the age of the coronavirus.

“Clearly, there is demand for live concerts,” Adam Alpert, CEO of Sony’s Disruptor Records told CNN. “People miss live music. They miss seeing their favorite artists. They miss the magic and energy that seeing live music brings.”

Drive-in theaters are an ideal venue for socially distanced concerts.

Drive-in festivals and concerts are one way to bring that magic and energy back without jeopardizing people’s wellbeing or breaking rules limiting the size of large gatherings. The trend also presents an opportunity for distributors to partner with bands and venues to sell merch – either on site or via e-commerce stores set up in conjunction each event.

In many ways, drive-in theaters (of which there are about 300 left in the U.S.) are an ideal spot for this new kind of concert. Everyone is “in cars orderly positioned, all facing a singular point, [with] a massive pre-built video projection wall,” Urban says. “All we had to do was park a flatbed truck at the base of the screen, point a camera at the stage and tap into the FM frequency so everyone could hear us in their cars, and we were off and running.”

Garth Brooks is planning a concert June 27 that will be broadcast at hundreds of drive-ins in the U.S. The singer told Good Morning America that “They’re going to run it just like a regular concert, but this is going to all over North America, one night only.” Tickets for the event cost $100.

On June 26 to 27 in Colorado, the Beanstalk Music & Mountains Festival switched from its original location at Rancho Del Rio to the Holiday Twin Drive-In. The festival sold out the 380 available double-spaced spots at the venue in a day. Ryan Noel, co-owner of the festival, notes that the festival has come up with multiple tactics to keep people socially distanced, from the fact that FM-only sound will encourage people to stay in their cars to having the concession stand take orders via text for delivery. “We’re going to hire a security team to make sure people aren’t just freely roaming around,” he told Variety.

Across the pond in England, Live Nation recently announced a series of drive-in concerts to take place at outdoor spaces in Birmingham, Liverpool, London and more cities. Musical acts such as Ash, Dizzee Rascal, The Lightning Seeds and Gary Numan have all signed up to play at the “Live From the Drive-In” events, according to the BBC. (Billboard has a running list of all the drive-in concerts scheduled for the summer.)

A Nielsen Music 2018 poll found that 52% of Americans attend a live music event each year. As the music industry has shifted from CDs to MP3s and streaming, music artists have increasingly utilized concerts and merch to offset the loss in revenue from music sales. Once the coronavirus hit, concert organizers and music acts began offering promotional items to raise money during the shutdowns for canceled festivals and shows.