Live music and the internet are not natural bedfellows. The former is all about where you are, who you're with and what you see, smell and hear; the other is about surmounting those natural limitations to experience things at a convenient remove.
Nonetheless, live music and the internet are forging an uneasy friendship. Whether it's YouTube videos from the show you missed last night or cutting-edge technologies that permit ultra-early adopters to remix songs before the band comes out for its encore, live music is coming to the people on the internet, albeit slowly.
MTV has long augmented its music videos and reality shows with "unplugged" performances and award shows featuring bands playing live on television. Now, the company that sparked the music video revolution in 1981 has been quietly ramping up its live internet streams too with its Live From NYC concert series.
Streaming live music is no small feat for technical and legal reasons, in that just about everyone involved in a song with the possible exception of the recording studio's janitor has to sign off. If any entity is capable of forging the myriad licensing deals required to make our -- okay, my -- dream of being able to buy an online ticket to watch a well-produced live music event anywhere in the world for $2 or so, it may well be MTV, now an arm of the entertainment giant Viacom.
Its efforts to provide shows for free could open up a market that has been unreasonably stagnant for over a decade -- despite the promise and profit potential of the intersection of live music (the most profitable sector of the music business) and digital distribution (efficient, pervasive).
So far this year, MTV.com has streamed live concerts from Gorillaz, Honor Society, Ashlyne Huff, Just Kait, K'naan and Wale (view cached version), Motion City Soundtrack, Never Shout Never, most of them in real-time. It's an impressive -- if short -- track record, and MTV plans more live online music offerings in the future.
"Music has always been at the core of our DNA and we have an unparalleled track record of providing up-and-coming artists with a platform to reach a larger audience," said MTV executive vice president of music and talent Amy Doyle. "This move into live streaming performances via MTV.com underscores this legacy and provides fans a new medium for musical discovery."
Kristin Frank, senior vice president and general manager of MTV.com and VH1.com added, "By taking an intimate musical performance and turning it into a live interactive web event, we're providing a virtual front-row ticket that allows fans to engage in a real-time dialog with their favorite artists and fans."
At a recent taping of MTV Unplugged for the band Phoenix set to air later this year, I couldn't help but notice a significant change in décor and approach from the Unpluggeds of years past. Rather than the lavish set and decent-sized crowds one expects from MTV Unplugged (and which do show up for the Live in NYC series), Phoenix played for a group of perhaps 30 journalists, family members and paid onlookers trucked in by a Manhattan extras casting agency called Gotham Casting (after all, television viewers shouldn't be subjected to looking at a row full of journalists).
After we crowded into a small sound stage on Manhattan's west side, I wanted to shoot a few photos to show how different this looked from the lavish Unplugged sets I remember from the Nirvana era, but was told not to, because the rights would be too hard to clear.
Ramshackle, off-the-cuff and spur-of-the-moment? Not quite -- this is Viacom, after all -- but the change in approach between the latest round of MTV Unplugged and those of days gone by was unmistakable in everything from the set to the size of the audience, as if MTV had taken a cue from fan-shot concerts on YouTube.
MTV -- along with Google and other entities with enough money to make live music streams look good -- are a far technical cry from a guy with a cellphone and a shaky hand, who we've all relied on to catch a favorite band at a show we couldn't get to.
And that's a good thing.
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