Features

One of today’s most successful festival franchises, the first Electric Daisy Carnival took place in 1997 and has since expanded with events throughout the U.S. and beyond, including Mexico, Puerto Rico and England, with plans to launch festivals in late 2015 and mid-2016 in Brazil and Japan. The focus is electronic dance music (EDM) with the throbbing beats of these rave-style events carrying on throughout the night, accompanied by elaborate lighting displays, carnival rides, fireworks, pyrotechnics and more, creating a dazzling experience of sights and sound.

Surround Comes to Live Stadium Shows

When it comes to stadium touring, the Grateful Dead pretty much wrote the book on the subject, having done more stadium shows than any band in history. So to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Grateful Dead (the band formed in 1965), the four original founding members (Mickey Hart, Bill Kreutzmann, Phil Lesh and Bob Weir) decided to launch an end-of-an-era “Fare Thee Well” mini-tour.

From June 13-19, more than 39,000 professional audiovisual buyers and sellers from more than 108 countries descended on Orlando’s massive Orange county convention center for InfoComm 2015. This represents a 5.6 percent increase in attendance over last year’s show. This year’s expo also drew 950 exhibitors in demo rooms and exhibits, occupying a record 515,000 net square feet of exhibit and special events space.

When it’s big, or even a little weird, Maryland Sound Inc. will take your call.

For four-plus decades, 2014 Parnelli Awards Audio Innovator Bob Goldstein, owner of Maryland Sound, has been called out on the more challenging gigs from presidential inaugurals to things for the government that all involved prefer we don’t know about.

Dennis Sheehan, longtime tour manager for U2 and 2008 Parnelli Lifetime Achievement award winner, died May 27. He was 68. Sheehan had been in Los Angeles with U2 for a series of shows in the early stages of their 2015 “Innocence + Experience” Tour. U2 had opened the first of five shows at the Forum the night before.

For anyone who’s never attended, the Musikmesse / Prolight + Sound exposition, held in Frankfurt, Germany from April 15 to 18, 2015, is a huge affair — sort of like a combined NAMM / AES / InfoComm / LDI, with ten exhibition halls of pro audio and music instruments spread out across the ginormous Messe Frankfurt expo complex and attracting 108,000 visitors. Product launches in pro audio tend run in cycles and right now, new sound reinforcement consoles and loudspeakers grabbed the headlines at the show, reflecting the overall health and continuing strength of the live market over studio products and other segments of the biz.

The total — the buying power of 20,400 FRONT of HOUSE readers — racks up to an impressive $4,939,000,000 — nearly five billion dollars. Compared to the pharmaceutical and automotive industries, the audio production and installation markets are fairly small. We as an industry may represent a market that’s admittedly “small,” yet nonetheless is thriving and even expanding. And with that in mind we would like to present some solid information as well as some indicators on the relative size and health of the event audio and installation markets.

In close proximity to Lancaster, PA, there is Lititz, a town of about 9,000 that’s home to The Julius Sturgis Pretzel Bakery and the Wilbur Chocolate Factory. Surrounded by dairy farms and cornfields, Lititz is also located in Pennsylvania Dutch country, an area closely associated with the Amish, known for their simpler way of living, horse and carriages, quilts, suspenders and the shunning of the public power grid and modern appliances.

All of us at FRONT of HOUSE were saddened to hear of the sudden (and certainly unexpected) passing of ML Procise III, who died away in his sleep in the early morning hours of March 5, 2015 at his home near Dallas. He was 62.

Like clockwork, the sunny skies of the Winter NAMM show in Anaheim, CA always coincide with the horrible weather, heavy snowfall and ice storms that seem to grip the East Coast and central states around the third week of the New Year. And the situation was no different from Jan. 22-25 for Winter NAMM 2015 as a record 99,342 attendees (including 13,208 international registrants) made the annual pilgrimage to enjoy short-sleeve weather, check out the latest in music and audio products — and maybe even do some business.