You want to stay within the comfortably familiar confines of pro audio. Burrow into Gearslutz. Hang out in ProAudioSpace. But the reality is that you’re going to have to spend as much time on Amazon as on Sweetwater, and in Best Buy and the Apple Store as in GC Pro. It’s inevitable, because the confluence of pro and consumer is far from over. The live sound business is still somewhat protected from the economic tumult that the studio side of the industry has experienced — you still need racks and stacks to move the kind of air that live sound requires, not just near-field monitors and a laptop.
And that laptop? If it’s not running the show, it’s recording it. Then there’s your iPad over there, or maybe even your iPhone. They pick up where the laptop left off, acting as remote controllers for huge systems powered by thousands of watts. Then, when the show is done, you use it to read Malcolm Gladwell or Stieg Larsson or this magazine.
The bottom line is that the tools of the professional and the accouterments of the consumer are becoming increasingly one and the same, and it’s worthwhile to take a look over at what consumers can get their hands on these days because it’s inevitably going to affect what you do. Most definitely.
Enter Spacebar
Spacebar is a good example. The startup lets touring artists and venues register and promote shows from the platform, which will then stream the audio of those shows live to users of Spacebar’s iOS app. Artists and venues can give the shows away for free or offer free five-minute previews before asking listeners to pay as little as a dollar, though either entity can charge whatever it thinks the market will bear.
In some cases, that could be quite a bit. Three major-league artists — Kanye West, John Legend and Lady Gaga — have been linked to Spacebar via Backplane, a startup intended to act as a white label behind celebrity social-engagement platforms. Troy Carter (Gaga’s and Justin Bieber’s manager) also backs it. In fact, both Backplane and Spacebar share some high-powered Google alumni, including Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s TomorrowVentures at Backplane, and Spacebar CEO Gregory Miller, one of the co-founders of google.org, the arm of the search company aimed at addressing global issues.
That’s a lot of high-tech cred, but will it translate into practical economics for live music ventures?
Hard to say at this point, but worth looking into, because while live music may be inherently insulated from the disasters recorded music has experienced, the live side can’t expect that kind of protection to last forever. Spacebar’s technical aspect is still a bit fuzzy; it required an email query to the company to get clarification. They recommend using Tascam’s IXJ2 mic/line amplifier and iOS interface as the connection to the FOH console, and they are aware that a show stream without some ambient sound from audience mics could sound like a sterile, anechoic mess, so they recommend blending in some room sound.
Spacebar co-founder James Nash admitted that the site’s tech pages are still a work in progress. Streaming rates are reportedly between 256 and 328 kilobits per second, on par with or better than Spotify and Pandora, which is still not saying much.
When it comes to economics, though, the signal flow is a bit easier to understand: after paying Apple its 30-percent fee (the same cut the iTunes Store has negotiated with the record labels), Spacebar splits the money equally between itself, the artist and the venue if the concert is broadcast from a registered location.
Spacebar’s tech section is pretty basic but its Silicon Valley/show business pedigree is undeniable, and that could make the economics of it attractive. Not so much for the indie artists Spacebar asserts to help — though the more ambitious and social-media-adept ones could benefit significantly from it. Yet for major artists, it could be a serious revenue source and fan-engagement device. Once the connection is established, virtually anywhere can become a venue, from a tour bus to a hotel room, and that’s a game changer on a par with how software-based multitrack recording allowed almost any kind of environment to become a recording studio. There are plenty of apps and websites out there that let consumers listen to concerts, whether they were recorded a few weeks ago, like Archivist, or decades ago, such as Wolfgang’s Vault. But what Spacebar does is let you hear the concert as it’s taking place, and that plays into the greatest strengths that live music has: it’s immediacy and its ephemerality — part of Spacebar’s TOS is that users agree not to record, copy or redistribute the live stream.
Alternatives? Maybe…
There are other live-music streaming services out there, like Evntlive and Concert Window. However, these tend to focus around social media; Spacebar makes a more direct connection between fan and artist. But they all point towards the same end: connectivity to rival the online infrastructure that has grown up around recorded music, from downloads to streaming. What this new generation of live-performance apps gets to work with is, hopefully, more compelling than recorded music because of its here-and-now nature. One also hopes that they perform better than most of what artists have to work with outside the live-music sphere, where most of that software hasn’t fulfilled its promise of offering the indie music business useful tools to generate a livable income. If Spacebar’s high-profile backers can pull in equally high-profile artists, then the live side — the best hope for revenue for music in general — can hope for even better monetization.
