With ticket receipts soaring and online music more popular than ever, why is live concert webcasting — which sits squarely at the intersection of these trends — still lagging?
After showing early promise at the turn of the millennium, webcasters’ path to success was slowed by three major roadblocks having to do with technology, audience and record labels.
The good news for music fans is that all three will likely give way in 2008.
“You’re never going to replace live music in terms of being there, of feeling the bass on your chest, and the smells, and all the other things that happen there,” said Arik Berquist, founder of Synchronicity Live, which lets bands stream their concerts free.
Berquist is right, but his company’s core assumption — that there’s a large, hidden audience for live online music — is almost certainly on the money as well. Although the online experience of a show doesn’t come close to being there, you do get to chat with others who have tuned in from around the world, and the only cost is your time. (Beers from your own fridge are cheaper, too.)
The technological roadblock that hampered the industry as it waited for efficient webcasting tools and increased broadband penetration has already crumbled. Today, nearly a third of U.S. internet connections are broadband. As of June 2007, that meant 66 million potential viewers domestically and a total of 221 million broadband users worldwide. Meanwhile, the online media explosion has fueled the growth of content distribution networks, or CDNs, run by companies like Akamai, AT&T and Level 3 that are capable of streaming shows in real time from concert venues.
The nature of live webcasting requires the signal to be distributed to viewers around the world in more or less real time, and sometimes one CDN isn’t enough. According to Justin Chapweske, founder and CEO of Swarmcast, these networks can be combined to provide an experience that’s “basically the same as watching television.”
His company’s streaming solution switches between content distribution networks in real time based on how they are performing for an individual viewer. Chapweske claims that Swarmcast was able to webcast a six-hour musical tribute to Nelson Mandela on iClips Network this month “so that the user (could) stay tuned in for hours and hours on end and never see any sort of interruption, jittering, rebuffering or anything like that.”
The audio on these webcasts is far from optimal; live mikes and streaming compression see to that. But the video quality often surpasses much of what’s available on YouTube.
If the technology issue hasn’t been solved yet, it’s damn close. But like the proverbial tree that falls unheeded in the forest, a glitch-free webcast doesn’t count if nobody sees it.
Luckily for webcasters, the second roadblock — wrangling viewers — is disintegrating. The booming popularity of social networks provides an easy way for webcasters to reach music fans, who tune into live concerts for an hour or more (as opposed to the seconds or minutes usually spent watching video clips). The extended time commitment makes music fans that much more attractive to sponsors. |
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“Last year, we realized we’re never going to get the whole world to come to Fabchannel.com to watch the shows there,” said Justin Kniest, CEO of Fabchannel. “We have to go to all these communities where the fans already are — MySpace, Bebo, Facebook or fan sites — and let them promote the artist. It’s working very well for us.” Likewise, SyncLive.com plans to launch a widget in a matter of weeks that will allow fans to embed live shows on social network profile pages.
Live webcast directory NowHound takes a different approach, one that could cultivate a huge audience, both for the service itself and for live online music in general. The recently launched site provides centralized listings of current and upcoming live events from around the internet that could become a crucial part of the music webcasting scene (the site also aggregates news and other live online programming).
“Imagine sitting at work in the States and flipping around through a couple hundred live concerts going on in Europe that second,” said NowHound founder C.C. Lagator in an e-mail interview. “Because artists performing live online are so scattered across the internet, they’re essentially preaching to the choir, with only their own fans able to follow them. In order for this space to grow, and for this to become a viable promotional tool for artists, there needs to be a way for live webcasts to be seen by new fans.”
Nate Parienti, co-founder and chief strategy officer of iClips, called the directory concept “extremely interesting.”
“I think something like that could be really helpful in alerting the mass market,” he said.
With the technology online and the audience on tap, the remaining roadblock is, as with so many other new ideas in music, the record labels. These days, they tend to own some of their artists’ publishing rights, so they have a say over whether shows can be webcast live.
Parienti said the rights-clearance process for a music webcast usually takes weeks. Even worse, webcasters must clear rights worldwide to cover their global audiences.
“It’s no use to me working with the Dutch sales office of Universal, I have to go the London and the New York offices to get rights… It’s mind-boggling,” said Fabchannel’s Kniest, who webcasts about 800 bands per year from Amsterdam’s two leading venues (Paradiso and Melkweg).
Although Kniest has had more luck with indies over the past eight years, he said major labels — especially EMI and Universal — have become more amenable to live streaming in the past year. Fabchannel has also begun offering labels a share in revenue generated from 10-second ads (pay-per-view pricing is not seen as a good option, because it restricts the audience even more than a 30-second ad would). The company hopes to expand Fabchannel’s live webcasting service to venues in Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States.
Still, webcasting negotiations could be moving too slowly for a music industry in desperate need of new revenue streams.
“It’s taking so much time that sometimes you wonder, ‘How much time do you think you’ve got to create new models?’” said Kniest. “New models take time to become big and get profitable, and I don’t think the record companies have two years left in the form in which we know them now.”
Whether the big labels come on board gracefully or not, 2008 looks like the year live music webcasts will take off.
Monday, December 24th 2007
By Eliot Van Buskirk |
