Is Some Version of Spotify Coming to Live Music?
If you’re a music fan (of course you are), you’re likely getting most if not all of your prerecorded music via a streaming service like Spotify or Apple Music. Music has already gone streaming, and now the most widely consumed of live events — sports — is following suit. Sports fans now have a plethora of streaming options to watch live sports in real time, many of them straight from the MLB, NBA and the NFL. And social media platforms have been steadily adding live sports along with music. For instance, soccer is the most popular sport on Instagram, where one in five of its users are soccer fans. And those platforms are attracting younger and more international eyeballs. The logical question is not when, but how long before touring and other concert events hit the virtual road? And what are the implications for live sound online?
LiveXLive
LiveXLive, a “live entertainment-focused digital media company,” apparently wants to become to the live-music industry what ESPN has been to sports: not just a platform on which to watch live but also a marketplace that provides a community around events. Its core platform is a music-streaming proposition that LiveXLive bills as the first “live social music network,” delivering premium livestreams, digital audio and on-demand music experiences from the top music festivals and concerts globally, including Rock in Rio, EDC Las Vegas, the Montreux Jazz Festival, and others. LiveXLive has a VIP tier (and who doesn’t these days?), which gives audiences access to premium original content, artist exclusives and industry interviews, and it also operates a social influencer network, LiveXLive Influencers. Like all things digital, it has an app, which launched in last May.
Here’s how LiveXLive’s CEO, Robert Ellin, describes LiveXLive’s raison d’être: “Most people can’t afford to get to these amazing music events. We’ve given the opportunity to fans to participate and have the best seat in the house. You get the opportunity to simultaneously watch your favorite artist, chat, buy a hat, buy a T-shirt and be as close to that live event as possible.”
This may sound like Facebook for Fyre, but its legitimacy and credibility stems in part from the events that have signed onto it. The reported 40 live events they’ve announced for this year include the recent Electric Daisy Carnival in Las Vegas and iHeartRadio Live with a concert by the K-Pop band BTS, part of a multi-year agreement with iHeartMedia granting exclusive global live-streaming rights to iHeart’s marquee events, as well as iHeart Wango Tango, Switzerland’s Paléo Festival de Nyon in July, and Budapest, Hungary’s Sziget Festival in August. LiveXLive’s stats are growing: it delivered 20 million live-streamed views across seven events during the first two months of fiscal year 2020, delivering live performances by 85 artists, and 125 hours of live music content. That outpaces the previous full year’s 51 million livestream views.
Is This An Inflection Point For Live?
Ellin makes a compelling argument for livestreaming live concerts: “Would you rather perform in front of 156,000 people, or ten million plus?” That remains to be seen (and heard). Few thought that recorded music would take the place of live performances 130 years ago, so it’s not inconceivable that “going” to a concert via VR and other streaming conduits might become a norm — if not the norm — in the not-too-distant future.
If so, what happens to the live sound and the people who manage it? Initially, probably little or nothing. The show itself remains the reason anything at all is happening, there or online, and the live sound is first and foremost for them. But as the online audiences grow in size (and economic importance), performances will begin to acknowledge their presence.
While streaming live concerts is relatively new, the idea goes back several decades. Known as simulcasts, concert audio was synched over FM radio to the concert picture playing on television. The Grateful Dead’s “Great Canadian Train Ride” concert simulcast in 1970 is often regarded as the first of these. Later that decade, a Pittsburgh broadcast of a live Boz Scaggs performance had its audio simultaneously broadcast on two FM-stereo radio stations, to create a quadraphonic effect. (Immersiveness with bell-bottoms!) Versions of ABC-TV/WABC-FM’s “In Concert” simulcast series became regular Friday night network fare from 1991 through 1998.
These shows advanced the art of mixing live music for broadcast television — for instance, Grammy Awards telecasts were sounding a lot better by the turn of the century, and the Recording Academy began regularly bringing top-tier music mixers, such as Phil Ramone and Eric Schilling, to the boards for them. They also laid the foundations for streaming live music. Where that goes next will be interesting to watch (and hear).
Some of those places will likely be communities that already congregate online, such as competitive gaming. Last February, the masked DJ Marshmello played a live set in the middle of Fortnite, and a sizable chunk of the game’s 125 million players logged on live to hear it. This is the kind of conduit that Mike Jbara, CEO of U.K.-based high-res streaming codec maker MQA, says is more likely the way that live shows become entrenched in the streaming universe. “Talking to artists managers, we’re finding that the idea of just streaming a live show is too costly and the outcomes are uncertain,” he told me at the A2IM Indie Music Week seminar in New York in June. “The encoding has to be done in real time, not batch-encoded, because you need the encoding to be extremely robust to avoid latency.” Inserting live music into a channel like eSports, on the other hand, makes it part of the overall streaming proposition from a technical point of view, while also putting the music in front of an already-established community of people who comprise its perfect demographic. That model can also be applied to brands that already associate live music through real-time media, such as the BBC’s regular simulcasts of the Glastonbury festivals, which the Beeb has been broadcasting since 1997.
At the same time, Jbara believes that the kind of synergy that the community-type connection between live music and streaming is also a way to stimulate demand for higher-resolution sonics for music, something that the MQA codec is designed to do. An iteration of it, MQA Live, has been used for several demonstration runs in Europe and Japan, as a proof of concept for applying high-res audio to live-streamed music. “The real-time encoder is contained in a small, rack-able box that takes the AES out from the venue’s [FOH console], creates an MQA file in real time, and sends that to any URL or broadcast infrastructure desired,” he explains.
What we can infer, though, is that FOH mixers and system techs will need to take the IT skills they’ve been acquiring in recent years to new levels, and further learn, like their broadcast-sports brethren already have, how to mix one format live while live-monitoring in another. We’re still in the early days for the live streaming of music, and given music’s ever-deepening intertwinement with tech, there’s no guarantee that the music will lead this dance. But at least enjoy the front-row seat we’ll have as our own Game of Thrones unfolds.
