You’re almost there. Just a few clicks away. As your clock ticks over to 12:04 you realise your computer is taking an increasingly long time to load. Following much distress, it finally completes its loading with a dreaded HTML error alert. As you then frantically go back to reconfirm, a heart wrenching message reading, ‘Sorry, this concert is now sold out’ appears just as your clock ticks over to 12:05….

This all too common scenario has partly encouraged bands to now create live streaming of concerts. Of course, the profitability of live streaming has been demonstrated nicely by companies such as Ustream and Livestream, but with Facebook starting to get involved in the space and YouTube recently engaging in their own streaming of live concerts, things could be about to get much more interesting.

As far as online concerts go, a lot has happened in the last month. One of the more memorable events was the Foo Fighters concert: live from studio 606, which was powered by Livestream and accessible through Facebook. Not only did this create a greater level of engagement among fans (as they could contribute to conversations between other fans and friends during the live performance) the concert was able to efficiency target the enthusiasts in the first place by tapping into the various fan pages of the band to generate guest invites. Unsurprisingly, the concert also had huge potential to expand, with each invitee of the 30,000 strong crowd, given the ability to invite their own friends.

Accompanying imageAkin to this, YouTube has also been active, streaming their second major concert (U2 live from Rose Bowl) and combining it with Twitter feeds to generate more traffic into their site. Although the combination of Twitter with live broadcasting means that the content can now be accessible to users, there may be nothing more irritating to the hard core fans than having to divert part of their attention from the concert towards fanatics posting incessant variations of ‘I luv this track’ throughout the duration. As painful as that might sound, it probably paled to the number of users twittering during YouTube’s feature length screening of the classic: Taxi Driver last month (‘Are you talking to me?’ anyone…). Still, you rarely get something for nothing.

Social media integration aside, it’s no surprise that YouTube has been slow to monetise their content. Although getting better at it now – with sponsored videos and related Adwords – the company’s loses are projected to be $470 million this year alone. Even though it’s unlikely that they will move towards charging viewers for their service, all this trialing just might be in anticipation of a change to their classic model of ‘free content on demand for all,’ – but fingers crossed that it’s not.

Despite these recent events, concerts can never be replaced, but it’s inevitable that they will continue to develop a life of their own online. Once this transition moves beyond the experimental stage that it’s in now, and assuming that it avoids charging users per view, the live streams in the future will likely become hugely populated by sponsors. Although the commercial nature might detract from the experience, it will at least hide the costs from the viewers and, in a few years time, may well become an accepted way to ‘attend’ concerts.

Until it reaches this point, I for one am excited about the shift. After all, there’s nothing worse than forking out $120 to see a band play live, only to discover the majority of their songs are from their recent album that you know nothing about. By just linking your computer to a projector with a VGA cable you can essentially create your own concert, in real time, for free, and restrict the screening to your own network of friends.

Of course, with all the moshing going on, you’ll still probably encounter a few sweaty bodies along the way. With this being the case, at least you’ll now know who they all are.

Tags: facebook, facebook concerts, foo fighters concert, online concerts, social media integration Twitter, U2, YouTube

This entry was posted on Monday, January 18th, 2010 at 4:58 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.