Streaming live concerts seems to be the greatest idea that’s never gotten off the ground. Dozens of companies stream live music in bits and pieces, with ISPs like AOL and Yahoo creating online shows around the concept. Live Nation’s partnership with Yahoo to stream one live concert every day, which began with the Dave Matthews Band last July, continues offering free, high-definition concert footage. Start-up Bulldog Digital Media is looking to expand its nascent business beyond festivals such as Outside Lands, Bonnaroo and South by Southwest to full-on tours. But the widespread live streaming of entire concerts or tours on a consistent basis remains elusive, despite more than a decade’s worth of predictions that this is the next logical step for the music industry.
According to a number of promoters and artists interviewed by Billboard, the main concern is that the immediacy of live streaming would cut into ticket sales, both day-of in the city where the show is taking place, and tour-wide once it becomes apparent that future shows might be available online.
The avoidance of live streaming for those and other reasons is understandable, but such reticence may not be wise in the long run. There are significant market indicators that point to streaming as being the foundational modality for music going forward. Spotify, the world’s largest stand-alone music-streaming company (YouTube streams more music but is a subsidiary of Google), has reached a market cap of over $500 million.
Like most online propositions, Spotify has yet to turn a profit; then again; it’s very much like the music business itself in that regard. But the convergence between Silicon Valley and Tin Pan Alley remains very much on track, and valuation in the digital age isn’t based on sales dollars but rather on eyeballs and market share, which is why national advertisers are jumping aboard the few concert live-streaming opportunities out there.
Spotify — which we should make clear hasn’t made any overtures in the live-music space yet — has over 50 million users, with about 13 million of them paid subscribers. Leveraging that, even on an audio-only basis, is a tantalizing possibility. Google’s music streaming service, YouTube Music Key, the video channel’s premium music and music video streaming service, was officially unveiled (though not yet rolled out) last November. As well as audio, users will be able to watch music videos, access exclusive remixes and save audio-visual playlists for offline listening. Add live streaming of concerts — something YouTube is more than technically capable of — and you’d have the streamed equivalent of the 360 deal.
Big Questions
There are two big questions to ask about the idea of live-streaming music concerts, and both have to do with money. (The technology for live streaming is already both mature and ubiquitous — hundreds of churches stream HD video every Sunday, including live music performances, so that’s not an issue.) The first is cost. “The production cost can be prohibitive, where you spend more money than you would make,” Billboard quoted Kevin Browning, a member of the management team for Umphrey’s McGee who oversees the band’s live content, as saying. “There’s often union fees. Bandwidth is actually a sizable hurdle.”
It may be costly, but is it prohibitively expensive? The overall cost of broadband is steadily declining, and at some point the nascent deployment of Gigabit-level broadband infrastructure, led by companies like Google (why the federal government isn’t doing this, as are the governments in places like South Korea, is beyond me) will hit a tipping point, lowering distribution costs even further.
Encoding services providers like Ustream are already extremely cost-effective and will only become more so. And live concerts, by definition, already have the technology platforms and the technical talent in place to capture the performance. (Lighting for concert streaming, versus for the live audience’s benefit, can be a bit dodgy, as it is for live television, but adroit camera placement can greatly compensate for that.)
Other costs — like the union fees that Browning referred to — are highly localized; there are non-union venues where that’s not an issue. IP costs implicit in taking the show out of the venue via streaming, such as royalty payments to rights holders like composers and publishers, can be addressed using negotiated blanket licenses, the same mechanisms that Spotify and Pandora and other streaming services use. In fact, with rights issues being the single biggest hurdle to anything having to do with the distribution of music, and those same companies that already have their licensing in place are well positioned to enter the live-streaming music market.
It’s Complicated
However, the other financial sticking point is more complicated. Are artists going to make any money from live-streaming their shows? The streaming of recorded music is already highly controversial, fueled by complaints over micro-payments per stream for rights holders and artists, and arguments over if — and how — non-rights holding participants (for example, hired musicians) should be compensated for streamed usages. Also, many allege that streaming cannibalizes downloads; if that’s the case, would it do the same for ticket sales if applied to live concerts?
The questions are valid for both recorded and live music, but the apples and oranges nature of the two suggest different outcomes. Yes, streaming almost certainly takes some of the money that used to go into buying downloads, but you’re not buying a product when you buy a ticket — you’re purchasing a temporal experience, one that the ticket buyers know is transient, impermanent except in their sensory realms. And that is what would act as the ultimate protection against live streaming for concerts. You see, as good as the streamed experience might be, it’s not the same as being there, whereas a stream of a song is good as a download to a blind horse, to corrupt an analogy from a favorite Faces LP title.
The upside, on the other hand, could be significant: proving that a live show is as good as the record, boosting ticket sales, as well as all the other promotional benefits ascribed to streaming. With 2014’s touring revenues down slightly for the year, streaming some of a tour’s shows might be just the ticket the business needs to keep live performance as the engine driving the music industry.
