Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Live Music Explodes Across Multiple Platforms

There has been a recent flush of new activity surrounding live music capturing , EMI announcing their new arm dedicated to recording shows and making them available afterwards (Pixies), U2, Foo Fighters, Wilco and Shakira offering webcasts of their performances, Universal/Sony creating VEVO, an online video destination, AEG announcing their relationship with a 3D film maker and distributor to release performances from their festivals and recently EMI announced a relationship with Hulu with their artist Norah Jones airing a performance from NYC venue Le Poisson Rouge.

What does all this mean? For the fans of these artists it is a fantastic way to stay connected to your bands. For the labels I think it's a pitch to try to save their businesses and for the artists that are associated with it, please make sure your manager and lawyer haven't made the costs of capturing these events be cross-collateralized against your recoupables as a promotion and marketing cost.

I think these moves are great, I only hope they create the runway for artists that could truly benefit from these platforms. To put it in perspective, Total Live Music's current data base consists of over 77K artists having close to 1.7M events performed in over 125K venues from around the world and we have only just begun!

While I'm glad to see the likes of Dave Matthews and Ben Harper utilizing these platforms, it's the up and coming artists that could truly benefit. Time will tell if that does become the case.

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