Live Music's Long, Strange Trip Over the Top

Live music has been on a bit of an over-the-top roll lately. The five shows in the Grateful Dead’s Fare Thee Well tour, which wrapped up in Chicago over the weekend, together racked up more than 175,000 paid live streams, making it easily one of the largest paid live music events ever to go over the top. Archived shows will be available through August 5, which will push the combined live and on-demand numbers even higher.

Though major festivals like Coachella and Bonaroo draw bigger online live audiences, those shows are free; the Dead shows cost $79.95 for the full, five-day run(individual shows were less). Archived shows will remain available through August 5, which will push the combined live and on-demand PPV take even higher.

While the Dead may be sui generis when it comes to pay-per-view streaming, live music streaming in general is attracting new interest from both startups and established players in the concert business.

This week brought word of a partnership between Verizon Digital Media Services and LiveXLive to live stream at least three day-long festivals this fall in the U.S. and internationally. Launched in May, LiveXLive is a subsidiary of hedge-fund backed Loton Corp., created to pursue what its founders believe is a growing opportunity in live music streaming.  While live-streaming music festivals obviously is not new, LiveXLive’s is thinking much more ambitiously.  According to the launch press release, LiveXLive wants to create a 24-hour over-the-top linear network around live music modeled on what ESPN is to sports and CNN is to news.

“We’re endeavoring to create the ESPN of premium live music experience,” LiveXLive president John Petrocelli told CM this week. “It’s our belief that there should be a home for these premium experiences because that world still seems very fragmented. Music is really the last major media category that doesn’t have a home the way sports has ESPN.”

According to Petrocelli, the dedicated network will feature concerts, performances, evenings out at a particular venue, content from broadcast partners, as well as some on-demand content. The network will have its own online portal but will be focused heavily on mobile devices, Petrocelli said. LiveXLive also expects to work with device makers and mobile carriers to gain distribution.

Read the rest of this post at Concurrent Media.