Even if you’re not Jimmy Iovine or Dr. Dre, chances are streamed music is becoming part of your life. Streaming services such as Spotify, Rdio and Pandora are becoming a critical part of music payouts, with a 51-percent increase in revenue from subscription services reported in 2013, through which revenues exceeded $1 billion for the first time, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry reported. About 28 million people around the world pay for access to them, up from eight million just three years earlier, according to The New York Times.
But one sector of music that’s resisted streaming has been live concerts. Now, Yahoo wants to change that. Starting with a Dave Matthews Band show in Jacksonville in July, Yahoo, in partnership with mega-concert producer Live Nation, launched a plan to live-stream one concert a day for 365 days straight, with shows by Kiss, Justin Timberlake, Usher and The Neighbourhood among them. The shows will be available through Yahoo’s video portal, Screen.
A Cultural Shift
While streaming is gaining considerable traction for prerecorded music, that hasn’t historically been the case for live music. Over the past decade or so, a few clubs and theaters have taken shots at streaming their live shows through their websites, with mostly minimal success. That was certainly due in part to technical problems — the kind of bandwidth needed to support HD video has only become reliably and affordably widespread in recent years, and live concerts, with their constantly shifting light levels and extensive use of color lighting, put an especially heavy burden on the codecs that convert video into data for streaming.
Ironically, the audio component for streaming puts the least amount of pressure on the process, even when surround channels are added. But even with more ubiquitous broadband, streamed live concerts have pretty much been sideshows, with a few regular outlets like Ustream putting on contemporary shows. In fact, the most notable successes seem to have come from classical opera productions, put on by establishments like New York’s Metropolitan Opera and streamed live to cinemas.
The Yahoo/Live Nation venture seems to understand that getting the ball rolling for live streaming of music concerts will require a cultural change. “Together, we’re going to feed the daily habit of music fans everywhere,” Yahoo marketing chief Kathy Savitt proclaimed in the venture’s press release, which adds that Yahoo will also keep 1,200 of its live recordings available online after the shows air so that listeners can continue to access them, in the process building up Yahoo’s Screen video sharing website as the go-to place for concerts online.
But while audio may take up only a fraction of the bandwidth of streamed concerts, it’s still the most critical aspect of the entire proposition. The company has a well-developed production division and, one assumes, sonic quality is reasonably high up in their hierarchy of needs. Live Nation already records hundreds of the 10,000-plus concerts a year it produces, many of which find their way online for archived streaming or end up as concert DVDs and Blu-ray discs. Scale should also not be an issue here, either — Yahoo receives an estimated 800 million unique visitors every month. What, I’m tempted to say, could possibly go wrong?
Live Music Enters the Content Fray
What this looks like is a way for the live music industry to get a piece of what’s considered the way forward for the music industry as a whole. Its timing is especially interesting, coming barely a month after Apple’s acquisition of headphone maker Beats’ own streaming service, Beats Music. Keep in mind also that Yahoo has Google’s YouTube squarely in its sights. Yahoo has been on a content tear since CEO Marissa Mayer took over, in particular beefing up Yahoo as an original content developer and host. It’ll take a lot to knock YouTube off its perch — the service had 11.7 billion video views in one month alone this year, according to comScore. But Yahoo is seeing a faster rate of growth than its competitor: the portal had 459 million views in February, a 39-percent increase from a year earlier, compared to Google’s three-percent growth over the same period.
That could potentially mean a lot for live music as a business, further monetizing what’s already become the single largest source of revenue to the industry. It could also be significant for live sound, putting an even higher premium on concert sound quality, as well as for all of the technology related to live event production.
It could also mean nothing. After eclipsing the CD in 2011, sales for downloaded music have been falling; 2014’s results appear to be trending about 13.4 percent below 2013’s sales for downloaded music. No one knows what the real potential is for streaming for music, prerecorded or live. It has a fairly dismal history for concerts so far, and as a music distribution system, it could easily end up following the download on a downward trajectory. (Online distribution offers far more precise analytics than ever and they suggest the Internet’s notoriously short attention spans will also apply to streamed concerts — American Express has revealed that the average viewer of its concert series, Unstaged, watches for about 20 minutes.) What would replace it? Who knows? That’s the nature of a music industry still trying to find its footing on terrain transformed by technology.
The fact that Live Nation and Yahoo want to invest in live streaming concerts and have already posted a deep line-up of shows suggests that the artists and promoters aren’t concerned that a live stream of a show might cannibalize ticket sales, reflecting a still-strong live touring sector. And some of the streamed shows will originate in smaller venues and clubs, giving a broader range of acts and stages more opportunities for exposure. Will people forego standing or sitting in a packed hall, bouncing beach balls overhead in between knocking back cold ones in plastic cups to see the band live? History tells us probably not. But Live Nation and Yahoo: thanks for asking.
