We’ve been down this road before. Way back in 2004, I told you about the initiatives by several companies (most notably, including Clear Channel, the radio giant that was a huge stakeholder in the touring business before it spun off Live Nation), to take a two-channel mix of a show as its last notes rang out and have it ready for sale before it had a chance to cool off. A copy, on CD, would be picked up by attendees who had either prepaid for them when they bought their tickets or as an impulse buy, like a pack of gum at the checkout counter.
Live Nation kept the concept going for a while, with competition from a few start-ups like DiscLive and iMusic Group. The technology was there: flypacks consisting of components including Yamaha DM2000 mixers, Avid Pro Tools and Alesis HD24 hard disk recorders for mastering took a separate multichannel feed from the stage, with their own ambient microphones added, and passed the stereo output of the console to CD-R burners (remember those?). Discs were loaded into pre-printed sleeves that have artist and venue information and were ready when you walked out.
No, Thanks
The trouble was, most people kept on walking. Live Nation eventually dropped their project, which had been known as InstantLive; others, like the iMusic Group, faded away. DiscLive managed to keep breathing, after a few identity changes. It was also known as Abbey Road Live US and later as DiscLive Network, a division of RockHouse Live Media Productions, based in Memphis. I interviewed its CEO, Zach Bair, in these pages in 2012, two years into a re-launch of the service that had gone on the road with, and CDs for, artists including Slash, Peter Frampton, REO Speedwagon, Dickey Betts, Tesla, 3 Doors Down, the Pixies and others. The concept later broadened beyond CDs, which continue to sink into irrelevance; buyers could also choose to get the show on a USB drive or a download to a mobile device. “It was ahead of the curve,” he told me at the time. “Some record labels had a hard time embracing it, and the artists could be nervous about having their music out so fast after a show.”
DiscLive still lives, sort of: its website lists shows recorded between 2010 and 2013 but nothing later, available mostly as boxed, limited-edition CD sets, a few as wristband USB drives. It’s frozen in time, a relic of an era when physical media was breathing its last and when the earliest millennials were already sharing smartphone video of the concerts with the world on YouTube. Its 44.1-kHz/16-bit sounded great but it couldn’t compete with right-now-and-free.
We’re Baaaack…
Bair is back with a new venture. StereoCast picks up where DiscLive left off, and it’s been refurbished for the times: it’s app based now, and its marketing knows what they’re up against these days, telling visitors to the website, “Put your phone down, enjoy the show, and have each song delivered straight to your StereoCast playlist within minutes of leaving the event.” The technology is much the same on the capture side, with Pro Tools as its main recording and mix platform, though JoeCo and even the hoary Alesis HD 24 decks are still on call. Mastering is done real-time, using a combination of software plug-ins plus a TC Electronic Finalizer. The downloads utilize the 320 kHz/16-bit OGG format or higher, depending on the circumstances. “We are also exploring other high-quality audio formats,” Bair says, by email. “We want to deliver a premium listening experience.”
StereoCast also has some data to offer potential users, including artists, who get a 30-percent split of revenues from their performances distributed through the service. They note that 73 percent of people use mobile devices during live shows (I would have thought it was closer to 100 percent) and that 51 percent of people purchased music online, though the data is from 2014. Venues are also welcome to sign up; they’re offered 15 percent of the sales.
StereoCast has some other juice, though. Some comes from the chairman of its board, Charles Koppelman, former head of EMI Music, a fixture on NBC’s The Apprentice: Martha Stewart after that in 2005 and, until 2011, executive chairman of the domestic goddess’ empire. Foreigner — the band — has also signed on as an early client, offering live recordings of its shows through the StereoCast app.
Feels Like the Last Time
App or no app, a classic rock band might be the kiss of death for a business rooted in the CD and download era, even as their brand offers some instant recognition and even some hipster cred thanks to their song placements in Burger King and Toyota commercials. Koppelman is a prototypical music-biz carpetbagger of a similar vintage but also as a player in the major leagues most of the time. During his time at EMI, Koppelman played a key role in the reunion of Frank Sinatra with Capitol Records, which spawned the five-million-selling album Duets LP.
A stew made up of a concept that never got any notable traction, technology built for physical media and repurposed for mobile devices, a management team that’s got more mileage on its odometer than an Uber car, and a contingency-based economic model (revenue sharing with very little in the way of up-front outlays) isn’t as appetizing as one would hope. It’s a shame, too, because what’s driving this iteration of a way to make a market out of recorded concerts is the same as that which has driven the concert and touring market ever since the demise of the record business as it was once known: live shows are where it’s at, financially and culturally speaking.
So why does it continue to be so hard to find a way to connect concerts to a recording proposition? At this point, no tour of any stature goes on the road without a multitrack recording system bolted onto the FOH console. But instead of sparking a new age of Frampton Comes Alive and Running On Empty, this torrent of content mostly flows onto artist web sites, available for free. Even live streaming, which is about as current as you can get in the music distribution world, is mostly fumes; companies like Bulldog, StageIt, AEG and Vevo are mostly focused on snippets rather than entire events.
For whatever reason, it’s not what consumers want. If we’ve learned nothing in this century, it’s that no one can tell consumers where to go, except perhaps the consumers themselves, who share everything they buy, see, hear, eat, smell and do through Instagram and Snapchat. Maybe someone can figure out how to have a vinyl LP ready by the end of the show.
