The future of music is one that is in the favor of consumers as the direction music is headed towards moving the decision power to the consumers. As listeners, we now have a greater choice of the music we hear and we are able to filter it on our own. Digital music as moved in such a way where you are no longer confined to just what record labels want you to hear. Music fans say what they want to hear.
Music fans are increasingly watching live concerts without gassing up cars, driving to venues, or paying for expensive tickets and convenience fees. Music webcasting has shown promise for over a decade, but the stage is being set now for an online live-music renaissance.
YouTube webcast its first-ever live full-length concert 1st November 2009 : U2 at the Pasadena Rose Bowl. It brought in 10 million viewers worldwide in addition to the 100,000 who attended in person. A spokesman said that makes it the biggest event in the site’s history.
Billboard followed suit with the launch of Billboard Live. Sony has big plans to beam shows to its movie theaters over satellite, and interactive features are bringing online viewers closer to the mix, and sometimes into the mix.
Live music and digital music are opposite sides of the same coin. People listen to digital music alone, while concerts are about physical proximity to musicians and the crowd. Developers are finding a new middle or common ground, although it took a little longer than some of us thought.
Live Concert Webcasting
The audience for live online music has grown substantially since the Tibetan Freedom Concert drew 36,000 viewers in 1996. Live-music webcasting director Marc Scarpa, who helped stream the Tibetan Freedom Festival and co-created of the MySpace Live series, says the internet will soon realize its live music potential.
A Google spokesman said YouTube, which also streamed short live performances from the Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival in late August, plans to webcast more full-length shows like the live U2 concert on a case-by-case basis.
But Billboard launched an ongoing concert series, Billboard Live, with a live R. Kelly show from Dallas that let fans choose between four high-bandwidth Microsoft Silverlight streams using partner OWLive’s technology. IPhone users watched the show in near-real time through an app using iStreamPlanet’s first-ever bandwidth-adaptive HTTP stream of live music to a phone. Billboard plans to do the same for shows by David Archuleta, Daughtry, Alicia Keys, Usher and others.
Limatitions
Don’t expect to be able to watch any show you please. Licensing issues delay rollout on the scale of the music video. There’s no standard deal for getting the rights to stream a live show. Each one-off production requires extensive negotiation involving just about everyone attached to the songs and the venue
Live Concert Interaction
The next step is for fans viewing a concert remotely to interact with a show within the venue, putting messages on the stage or even sounds in the speakers.
Deep Rock Drive has been experimenting with letting bands play between massive monitors that show online fans’ reaction to the music in real time, and said it might let fans at home cheer between songs using their own microphones. The payoff for interacting with actual venues rather than that company’s cyberstage is potentially even bigger.
Current implementations let online viewers vote on set lists, appear in the webcast if chosen to be a host, and send in videos of themselves watching the show. “If Linkin Park is your favorite band in the world, you send in a video [of yourself talking about the show and] after the performance is over we can have a couple of these real-time video comments included in the show.”
In addition to the six to 10 cameras that shoot webcast concerts, Scarpa has been experimenting with pulling live video from showgoers’ cellphones and incorporating that into the webcast, and he plans to let the remote audience collaborate musically with bands, contributing riffs or mixes that play over the venue’s sound system.
‘Live’ Music in Movie Theaters, Living Rooms
Sony Club Dates strikes a happy medium between the solitary experience of watching a show on your computer screen and the experience of attending it in person, by piping live or prerecorded shows directly to movie-theater screens. Fans watch them together in a surround-sound environment that does the music a lot more justice than your desktop computer speakers do, and at a much higher bandwidth. Tickets cost $10 to $15.
At this point, Sony has experimented with one live and some taped concerts, but once this pilot program is complete, the company plans to beam live shows to theaters by satellite, selling tickets and sponsorships.
Sony’s first such event featured an Aug. 20 Third Eye Blind show viewers could watch in theaters Oct. 22. Up next is Creed, who will appear “live” in some of Sony’s 4,000 theaters nationwide TODAY.
Once the program is up and running, Fidler told us, Sony will deliver the shows in high-definition directly to its Bravia line connected televisions, the company’s Blu-Ray players and possibly the Sony PlayStation. He said the concerts are “exclusive to Sony from the theatrical release to this video-on-demand program on the Bravia network.”
Just-in-Time Live Recordings Sold at Shows and Online
Showgoers can buy professionally recorded concerts as they exit a venue on USB stick, CD, DVD or as a digital delivery. While by no means the first, EMI launched a major initiative in this area Wednesday: Abbey Road Live, which builds on the legacy of Live Here Now, which was launched by EMI’s Mute Records label in 2004, and forms the core of EMI’s nearly-real-time live music sales program.
Also, consumers may no longer have to go through the tedious task of sifting through millions of songs to find a band or songs which they may like. With sites like Last.fm, consumers can easily find out about a band, check out artists similar to their favourite singer, and know what are the top songs which are recommended by other users. This helps consumers to make an informed choice before purchasing a song or album. (Prevents consumers from buying an album or song, and end up not liking it, wasting their time and money)
