The Biz

Recent stories in the New York Times and on wire services such as Reuters underscore a small but significant collateral problem stemming specifically from the alleged terrorist plot to blow up airline flights originating in the U.K. in August, as well as from the larger issue of security aloft. Several symphony orchestras and other musical performance groups have had to cancel individual dates and even entire tours in the wake of the U.K. plot reports as British airport authorities and security agencies denied passengers any carry-ons, including their instruments or music-related technologies such as laptops.

An earlier column focused on how a couple of huge entities, AOL and its partners XM Satellite Radio and concert-meister AEG, and Live Nation, the Clear Channel concert spin-off, are trying to make leaving a music concert as eagerly anticipated an experience as going to it is supposed to be. Live Nation hopes to do this with after-show CDs hot off the on-site burners; AOL et al. want to do it with downloads. It's a format battle not dissimilar to ones taking place elsewhere in entertainment technology, most notably between the Blu-ray and HD-DVD formats for control of the post- DVD high-definition landscape.

Don't think of it as church. Instead, think of it as a media center with the ultimate, eternal, all-access laminate. Any sarcasm here is tempered by a very serious reality: houses of worship have become big business in the U.S. and increasingly around the world. The American Christian fundamentalist movement has been the prime force behind the trend, the epitome of which are mega-churches, such as the now-famous tabernacle of Joel Osteen and his evangelical and highly telegenic family, who broadcast weekly from what used to be the Houston Rockets arena in Houston, where they fill the seats more consistently than most NBA teams can. (See the FOH Interview with Lakewood audio chief Reed Hall)

The battle between physical media and virtual distribution as the dominant modality in the entertainment business continues to rage. Billions of dollars get invested in the next generation of optical discs, Blu-ray and HD-DVD, even as Bill Gates declares them DOA and predicts a virtual future. This debate has very real consequences for the concert and touring sound industry: Forms of entertainment no longer stand apart from each other, and that CD you got at Yankee Stadium not only has cool music on it but is also a coupon good for a pack of Ballpark Franks at your neighborhood Von's. The concert event is becoming less an "event" and more of another stage in the larger evolution of music as a marketing tool. And we're not talking bannering a venue here, either.

Think of recent history as divided into two archeological time periods: the craft-driven epoch and the market driven era. The former goes back many, many, many eons–at least to 1970–and was characterized by technology-based connections between parties in the live sound continuum: artists, sound companies and mixers chose each other almost solely on the basis of how good the technical fit was between them (with allowances, of course, for economics). The market-driven era, which we're in now, still has a technological dimension to it, but it also takes other factors into consideration. For instance, the kind of musical instruments used on a tour or in a music video is a function not only of what the musicians and technologists on the project want but also of what kinds of cross-marketing deals might have been made at levels above the trenches. The kinds of microphones in a venue might depend on which company has paid to banner that place. Those sorts of considerations only increase in importance and pervasiveness in a market-driven environment. That's why I thought that a new company, Guesthouse Projects, which launched earlier this year, fits the zeitgeist so well. Founded by Greg McVeigh, former vice president of touring sound at Meyer Sound, Guesthouse Projects takes the conventional relationship between touring artist and touring sound company and creates a multidimensional object by bringing a tour sound equipment manufacturer into the picture in the earliest stages of the relationship. Instead of a deal being struck between the first two parties, and then the manufacturers of the equipment leveraging their presence on the tour by following up with press releases, Guesthouse Projects proposes to have the equipment manufacturer become a dynamic rather than reactive participant in the process of putting sound systems together for artists and tours.

When you hear that infectious fournote audio signature on television, you know without even consciously realizing it that there's "Intel inside." The makers of components of larger systems, who have tended to labor anonymously in years past, are waking up the need to market their own brands. It's a worldwide phenomenon that transcends market sectors: Siemens informs you that they may not make the television set, but they make the technology that makes it brighter; Boeing takes 30 seconds next to a Budweiser commercial during a football game to extol their aircraft despite the fact that most viewers aren't currently in the market for a $30-million 737.

A couple of years ago, I wrote about an emerging trend that would have CDs of live concerts burned and ready for distribution just as the last notes were ringing from the stage. Three companies were vying to get this concept off the ground–a couple of indies and Clear Channel.

Today, Clear Channel is out of the concert business. Its entertainment holdings, ranging from Ozzfest to Jason Giambi's supermarket-opening appearances, are now part of Live Nation, a publicly-traded spin-off venture. It also inherited Clear Channel's CD-burning venture, Instant Live, which has been used on a slew of shows in the last year, including Hall and Oates, O.A.R., Black Crowes, Big Head Todd and the Monsters and The Cult.

The live concert/touring biz pulled a rabbit out of the hat in 2005. Mid-year, Pollstar's data indicated that concert attendance had declined in North America by nearly 12% despite the fact that the cost of tickets had experienced their first drop in a decade. Fewer warm bodies in cheaper seats produced a drop of more than 17% in overall revenue. However, by year's end, a tour schedule back-loaded with big names such as the Rolling Stones and U2 pushed the year's total take to $3.1 billion, up 11% over 2004.

When the Beatles played Shea Stadium in New York in 1965, the music P.A. consisted of a half-dozen Shure Vocal Master systems–two columns of 6- and 8-inch speakers fueled by a combination mixer/power amplifier. Thankfully, the miles of Hi-Z cabling running around the stage didn't honk back much telemetry from the then-relatively small number of satellites floating around in orbit.

Looking back, it's almost comical that an event of that historical magnitude had such a puny P.A. system, but that's what you had at the time. The Vocal Master was the apotheosis of what someone could buy off the shelf in terms of a public address system in those days. But there are a couple of trends that make what was the state of the art at that time worth remembering.

Viewers of Rock Star: INXS, the reality show that sought to find a new lead singer for the vocally-decapitated Australian rock band, were getting a little more reality than they might have bargained for. Or a little less.

On the other hand, John Gott had carved out a great niche for himself and should be the envy of every FOH mixer over the age of 30: After mixing live sound for artists including Pat Benatar and the Talking Heads in the 1970s, he combined a technical gift with an entrepreneur's eye to create a few new live sound and lighting products, one of which eventually became SLS Loudspeakers.

Flight cases are a fixture of the live sound industry. They're what enable us to take the show on the road. But one of the handful of custom makers of specialty flight cases has made more than a few that go beyond the standard mixer or effects rack.

Showcase Custom Cases in Nashville has done plenty of the usual types of cases for the usual suspects, including Tim McGraw, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Vince Gill, Larry Carlton, Toby Keith and Reba McEntire. But they've also done plenty of unconventional ones, and for some unconventional artists, as well, including a case for Sesame Street's "Big Bird" character and one for a huge champagne glass that Playboy Playmate Catherine D'Lish slid around inside for a Playmates tour several years ago.