Two industry deals get worked out, but maybe not in the way planned …
The music industry has always had an ambiguous relationship with Clear Channel — you may have disliked their practices, but no one could deny their influence and ubiquity. The live sound community especially has had an intense link with what had once been the 600-pound gorilla of the concert production business. When Clear Channel tired of some of its entertainment holdings and spun off the concert production business in December 2005 in the form of Live Nation, a couple of interesting strings remained connected. One of those strings just got resolved — sort of — and it really underscores just how important the live music industry has become to the entertainment sector overall.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is a high-tech civil liberties organization — think ACLU with a soldering iron. When Live Nation launched its after- concert CD duplicating business in 2006 — which we’ve written about in this space before — it did so with what it asserted was proprietary technology for automatically loading, burning and distributing the finished discs when the last note of the show was still ringing.
Or did they? One of the emotional strings that seemed to come along with the Live Nation spin-off was a tendency to try to bully the market a bit. That’s what the EFF alleged that Clear Channel/Live Nation tried to do when it applied for a patent for the technology and used the application’s pending status to try to block other similar ventures to record and sell CDs of concerts by others. (There’s some more ambiguity — the intellectual property at issue here predated the Live Nation spin-off.
Apparently, a court has agreed. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office announced in March it would revoke the patent held by Clear Channel Communications. According to the EFF attorney Jason Schultz, the patent asserted by Clear Channel would have created a monopoly on all-in-one technologies that produce post-concert digital recordings, and that Clear Channel threatened to sue those who made such recordings. “This locked musical acts into using Clear Channel technology and blocked innovations by others,” he says.
In fact, the EFF continued in a press release, its own investigation of the patent claims found that Telex had in fact developed similar technology more than a year before Clear Channel filed its patent request. “EFF asked the PTO to revoke the patent based on this and other… evidence,” the release states.
Role Change
Live music events are no strangers to litigation and copyright issues. But what’s different here is the scale. Large corporations like Live Nation and AEG have identified live music events as a reliable revenue generator at a time when prerecorded music continues a six-year sales slide. It argues for a reconsideration of what the central technical person in the mix — the FOH engineer — is and can be. Many record labels are headed by record producers — Jimmy Iovine, Ron Fair and Jack Joseph Puig are just a few of the first-chair people who currently occupy executive positions at major labels. But I’m wracking my brains here trying to think of one live-sound mixer that has gone beyond a business card-fronted consultancy to the executive suite at a pro audio equipment manufacturer. Or, for that matter, a record label.
I think this could change. I think it needs to and that it would be a good thing. If the music industry is going to put greater emphasis on live events (and evidence show that they already have — a 2002 study by Princeton economics professor Alan Krueger showed that 31 of the 35 top-grossing music artists made more money from concerts than from record sales), it makes sense for those with trench-level experience in making them happen to ultimately move into positions to help direct the course of the industry.
NSCA
There was NSCA show coverage in April’s FOH, but one thing worth noting here was a conversation with Jeff Lowry, the marketing manager for SLS Audio. SLS was noted here last year for what I thought was a prescient move: a product integration deal by which they provided the highly visibly branded sound system for reality show Rockstar. Like any product placement, the move cost the company a chunk of change, but Lowry says it has already returned on the investment.
Not, however, quite as planned. The move hoped to increase brand awareness of SLS’s consumer offering, the Q-Line of home theatre speakers developed with Quincy Jones. The QLine is still out there, selling through a network of smaller distributors after a deal with mega-retailer Best Buy didn’t work out as planned. But Lowry says the biggest dividends have come on the pro side. “Professionals knew our technology; now, they know the products, too,” he says. “Rockstar worked out well for that.”
The convergence of professional products and the “lifestyle” of pop culture is real and it’s effective. The entre nous aspect of any professional community is always going to be important, from training to simple socializing. But companies fail to recognize at their own risk that when it comes to entertainment technologies, the line that defines what’s pro and what’s not is getting blurrier by the day.
Clear things up with ddaley@fohonline.com.
