Someone once said, there are three kinds of lies: "lies, damned lies, and statistics". Looking at the stats of the music business in the last couple of years can be dismaying: despite a bit of a bounce last year, CD sales remain relatively stagnant and down more than 20% over the last five years; last year, of course, was a fairly dismal one for pop music concerts, and since neither all the king's horses nor all the king's men can put Ashlee Simpson together again (although CAA will try), it's possible the public's mistrust of when it's live and when it's Memorex could become a hardened attitude. But there are other numbers to look at. Sales of music on DVD are one of the few bright spots on the business horizon, and it's the sole RIAA-tracked category that's showing sustained double-digit growth. And if you weren't aware of it already, much of that DVD music juggernaut, and most of its new-title releases, are based on live concerts, many of which take place solely for the purpose of being shot for the DVD. Snippets of the performances are also finding their way into DVDs that accompany new CD title releases, too. The live concert aspect actually adds value to a CD that might otherwise suffer the fate of so many others lately.
In recent months, we've looked at how the audio academies continue to increase and emphasize the live sound and staging components of their curricula. The major schools have all seen interest and enrollment in live sound courses increasing, and more colleges and universities are adding sound to their increasingly technology-oriented staging curricula.
As a forum for disseminating advanced audio theoretical and practical papers, the AES has always been cutting-edge. As a bellwether of market sentiment, its record is pretty dismal and tends to lag rather than portend the future. Good.
That makes the organization's decision to heavily emphasize live sound technology and techniques at the AES Europe show, in Barcelona, all the more an indication that live sound as a career trend isn't just up and coming–it's already here. In a canned but candid interview, Spanish convention co-chair Eloi Batlle and AES executive director Roger Furness underscores just that.
"One thing that was different from former conventions was the arrangement we made for the technical session devoted to live sound," says Furness. "All workshops, tutorials, seminars and demos about live sound were pooled in one room equipped with state-of-the-art technology. The program there covered all relevant questions on live sound from mixing to monitoring, from microphones to public address systems … to avoid overlapping between sessions about the same topic."
