The Biz

From the FOH position, you can pretty accurately gauge the impact the show is having on the house, but what if you want to gauge the effect your industry is having on the economy? That's something that your U.K. counterparts have a better handle on now, thanks to a survey from UK Music, an umbrella organization representing the collective interests of a broad range of sectors of the U.K.'s commercial music industry. The report found that large-scale live music events, such as festivals, are contributing over £1.4 billion a year – that's $2.3 billion – to the U.K. economy from all sources, including ticket sales and travel to the event locations.

Owsley "Bear" Stanley, who died on March 15 in Australia in a car accident, will be remembered by most as a hub of the psychedelic counterculture of the 1960s, the enabler of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters' acid tests chronicled by Tom Wolfe. Readers of FOH will also recall him as a seminal figure in live sound, who designed, financed and operated the Grateful Dead's massive sound system and mixed live sound for Hot Tuna, Starship and other bands, both before and after he was arrested and imprisoned for possession and intent to sell 350,000 doses of his trademark psychedelic, LSD, in 1967.

The Beatles reportedly used a few Shure Vocal Masters at Shea Stadium back in 1965. They were hardly enough to fill the Mets' cavernous venue, though even the old honeycomb horn PA system that used to mangle Ron Swoboda's name wasn't much help against the roar of 55,000 hysterical adolescents. But it does remind us that while large concert PAs have quite an evolutionary history, from Bob Heil and his Grateful Dead stacks to the modern flying line array, small clubs have had a more spotty time of it, making do with what have been for decades essentially cast-offs from an earlier era. Line arrays are the technology heroes of the new century, but try getting one of those into a grungy club with a 12-foot ceiling.

Jane Kaczmarek, the actress, said, "Awards shows are my greatest inducement to get back into shape." Awards shows are as much about looking good as doing well in the estimation of your peers, but they also are a reflection of the industries they celebrate. So it was meaningful when, last January, the TEC Awards program, which had been a fixture at the AES Show since its inception 26 years ago, moved instead to the Winter NAMM Show.

Live music, the putative savior of the music industry, took a hit in 2010, and that has serious implications for live sound systems providers and operators. According to Pollstar's end-of-year report, concert touring revenues declined steeply last year: ticket sales for the 50 biggest grossing tours globally fell 12 percent, to $2.93 billion, from $3.34 billion in 2009. In the U.S., the world's single biggest music market, the drop-off was even larger, with concerts here reporting a 15 percent decline to $1.69 billion. And those same top 50 acts played 8 percent fewer shows in 2010, says Pollstar.

A turning point in rock ‘n' roll was surely the first time some odd piece of it was transformed from a practical item to a priceless artifact that was priced, finally, on the auctioneer's block. A plain vanilla guitar pick used by Eric Clapton went from someone's personal treasure to becoming part of someone else's memorabilia collection.

The larger pro media arts & sciences schools have been steadily adding and expanding their course offerings, and many have taken the next logical step and are adding online courses, just as their more conventional college and university counterparts are doing. But how does live sound fare when it hits the broadband pipe?

While many of us were distracted by the glittering technoproducts at the CEDIA Show in September, the FCC was voting to finalize rules for use of the White Spaces spectrum, those controversial spectra in between the recently established digital television transmission channels.

Take a look at the "Clients" page of Italian sound system developer Outline, and you'll see a list of more than 200 significant installations in arenas, theaters, festivals, clubs and facilities throughout Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

Digital mixing console? Check. Digital plug-in processing? Check. Digital audio network to stage and monitors? Check. Digital multitrack hard disk recording system? Increasingly, check – and that's a potential checkmate for what was once a thriving sector of the live music business.

This is the final installment of FOH's summer business focus on Nashville as a touring hub, and we're starting where we began, at Soundcheck, because the story of that business is a worthwhile lesson in economics, strategy and humanity.