The battle between physical media and virtual distribution as the dominant modality in the entertainment business continues to rage. Billions of dollars get invested in the next generation of optical discs, Blu-ray and HD-DVD, even as Bill Gates declares them DOA and predicts a virtual future. This debate has very real consequences for the concert and touring sound industry: Forms of entertainment no longer stand apart from each other, and that CD you got at Yankee Stadium not only has cool music on it but is also a coupon good for a pack of Ballpark Franks at your neighborhood Von's. The concert event is becoming less an "event" and more of another stage in the larger evolution of music as a marketing tool. And we're not talking bannering a venue here, either. In a previous column, we looked at how the post-concert CD business is trying to position itself. Live Nation's inheritance of Clear Channel's Instant Live after-concert CD product gives concertgoers a souvenir of the show, but it also can act as a draw to get them to the concert in the first place, in the same way that Bat Day and Seat Cushion Day sell extra tickets because people want the premium the venue is offering.
But just as much of the rest of the music industry is moving towards the virtual paradigm, can concerts be affected by that same shift? More to the point, how can they not?
Network Live can be viewed as Live Nation's virtual counterpart. Launched last year, this venture between AOL (which has been a big producer of Internet-based live performances), event presenter AEG (which operates live entertainment venues, owns sports franchises in the U.S. and Europe and promotes concert tours for such artists as Prince and Paul McCartney) and XM Satellite Radio combines the immediacy of the 'Net with that of live concerts, and is trying to build a virtual version of Woodstock in every iPod–only bigger. AOL, which streamed 2005's Live 8 event, declared that the show had 5 million viewers globally, and more as the archived version of the show was pulled down on an on-demand basis by millions of others after the fact.
The sheer numbers show how virtuality can change the concert business. AOL's Music Live concert series claims an audience of 100 million, XM adds another 4.4 million to that figure. On that kind of scale, getting people into an actual venue for musicians to perform in front of could become an exercise similar to assembling a studio audience for a television game show. The big bucks aren't in the ticket sales, they're in the eyeballs for advertisers.
Virtuality in live concerts is taking quick steps forward. AEG announced in May of this year a new sports complex it's building in Berlin that will be wired for wireless–German cellular telephone provider O2 will manage wireless broadcasts and event alerts throughout the venue and from the venue to their entire subscriber base. Advertising for concerts, promoting the artists, podcasting the show and providing access to archived versions of shows for download later make the 17,000- seat arena itself seem kind of puny. O2 and AEG estimate a crowd of three million visitors over a three-year period, with about 300 events anticipated in that timeframe. They say that makes it worth the almost-$200 million it will cost to construct the new venue, and they're planning to team up to do the same with the former Millennium Dome in London in late 2007.
Network Live is hardly snoozing. They launched with a Bon Jovi concert in Times Square last summer and partnered with Nokia to extend the concept's reach beyond the walls of a performance venue. The next new product is Standing Room Only, an AOLAEG- XM venture that kicked off at SXSW in Austin, where a kind of built-in audience waited for music to be slid past them on rails. Ticket sales were to the music conference, not the concerts. Res ipsa loquitur, for you Latin majors out there. ["The thing speaks for itself," for everyone else –ed.]
The concept is now a juggernaut. Festivals like Bonaroo have their own during- and after-concert digital distribution systems. Even neighborhood clubs, like Maxwell's in Jersey City, have been experimenting with inclub kiosks that allow patrons to download a recoding of the night's shows to a USB drive right then and there. The kiosks are viewed as lossleaders, bringing thirsty patrons into the clubs, who will then hopefully buy the CDs of the band (who are almost certainly playing for free), and who will be encouraged to sign up for the digital distribution subscription service of eMusic, which put the kiosks in the club in the first place.
Live-sound mixers have a place in all this, but the skill sets are going to change. AOL's netcasts have tended to originate in recording studios, using recording engineers who have some experience in broadcast audio, the closest operational analogy to netcasting. As this paradigm moves out into actual concert venues, experienced FOH mixers will be at a premium, but only if they also have some idea of the exigencies of sending sound with picture. They will also have to have knowledge of the many audio and video codecs in use for digital distribution. A fundamental axiom that has emerged from experience with them is that each codec colors and manipulates audio in highly specific and unique ways. Grasping these technical nuances and staying aware of how vast changes on the business side of things are rewriting the maps of the music industry are what it's going to take to thrive in the virtual concert age.
