The Biz

I recently attended an all-day technology demonstration at the Bose lair outside of Boston. On the way, there were lots of Bose active noise-canceling headphones visible onboard the flight. And in the room at The Charles Hotel in Cambridge, there was a Bose Wave radio, as iconic as a Herman Miller Aeron chair or a Le Corbusier chaise lounge, sitting on the nightstand. All this foreshadowing might have seemed like a PR person’s dream, as though somehow Ford had managed to make every car on the road taken to one of their dealerships a Mustang or an Escape. The reality is that it’s a fact of life: Bose has built a tremendous brand in the consumer electronics business.

Veteran FOH mixers Greg Price (Ozzy Osbourne, Black Sabbath, Van Halen) and Parnelli Award winner Brad Madix (Rush, Beck, Rage Against The Machine) have formed Diablo Digital (diablodigital.com), a venture that offers ready-to-roll equipment packages for live recordings. It’s also another instance of the kind of entrepreneurism that reflects an increasingly DIY live-sound business.

Some like to do it sitting down. Some like to do it standing up. You now what I’m talking about. Wait, no, not that. I’m talking about how FOH mixers approach their work: standing behind the console or sitting behind it, or some combination thereof. It’s an important topic for a number of very good reasons, some of which may not have occurred to you.

We never needed the word “analog” until digital came along. In the technologically antediluvian universe of pre-zeroes-and-ones, analog, like God, simply was, with no reason to have to somehow quantify it. Similarly, when Thomas Edison came along with his new-fangled recording machine, we then had to adapt our understanding of the word “live.” Before you could record it, music, of course, was always performed live. Edison’s invention led us to the irony of the “live” album, which had its heyday in the 1970s, as well as endless variations meant to fool not our frontal lobes but rather our limbic cores with phrases like “recorded before a live studio audience!” Is it live or is it Memorex? After a while, we seemed to stop really giving a damn.

You might have Pro Tools integrated into your FOH console, but you may not be the only one legally recording the show. In a twist on the Grateful Dead’s well-known encouragement of fans taping their live shows, modern rockers MGMT are inviting their own legions to do the same, but with a nod to the vicissitudes of contemporary music legalities. The band opened a “fan taping section” at their shows in Atlanta, Chicago and Brooklyn late last year, announcing it via their website but specifically asking that tapers first register in addition to purchasing tickets for their shows.

The halftime show at the Super Bowl has been a music extravaganza in recent years, one with its own set of cycles. After Janet Jackson’s 2004 “wardrobe malfunction,” we went into a wave of classic rock acts, including McCartney, Springsteen and The Who, followed by a round of hip-pop with Madonna, Black Eyed Peas, Beyoncé, LMFAO, Nicki Minaj and Cee Lo Green. This year finds Bruno Mars the star of the halftime show, seemingly a continuation of the last two years’ trend with (only slightly) more testosterone.

FRONT of HOUSE runs this business column because the publisher, the editor and I have all long agreed that all the cool gear and all the technical expertise in the world alone won’t make someone’s career successful, unless that person develops some business chops. Increasingly, the rest of the live-sound universe agrees.

Walking into an anechoic chamber is one of the most disorienting experiences anyone attuned to sound can have. The lack of reflections confuses the brain, its usual aural cues stifled by the deadened environment. Sometimes you don’t realize just how distorted your perception has become until you exit the chamber, relieved to feel the ambient world around you once again.

It’s a tough economic time for music, but if you have to be in that business, live music is where you want to be. While the overall U.S. music industry can expect to see annual growth of just over 1 percent through 2017, according to a recently released PricewaterhouseCoopers industry analysis, the report projects that the concert business will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 3 percent through the same period. In other words, live-performance music revenues are projected to be triple those of the music industry as a whole going forward.