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FanDeAliFee · #43 06-29-2010, 01:34 AM

Contents: Music industry economic analysis; new opportunities for enhanced show incomes opened by technology.

In this young century, the music recording industry has shed not a few tears over Napsterism, and some of us have shared more than a few words here about it and the future of the music industry as well. Of course, Napsterism, by which I mean the de facto loss of copyright protection, has profound implications for all sorts of intellectual property beyond music, a far more anxious subject about which to contemplate. But this is an Alizée music site and so I will focus on music, including observation about some considerations peculiar to it.

People remain willing to travel to physically attend extended musical and theatrical performances, something they would not do to access book text or software, for example. This provides additional avenues for revenue not available to those who own other types of intellectual property.

I believe it was Lefty who asserted some months ago that the income of musical artists has never mainly relied upon that part deriving from recordings. Thus I am pleased to now come across a study published online late last year which examined the economics, including factor shares, of the British music industry over a half-decade interval during this century. Find it online at: http://labs.timesonline.co.uk/blog/2...-file-sharing/

I know little about the music industry, and so was pleased to read so many qualified details about its macroeconomics. The take-away from the study is that while recording industry income is plummeting, the music industry as a whole is actually growing, because of the steady licensing income from public performances, plus vigorous income growth from live events.

While this surely is terrible news for the recording industry, it is still not necessarily good news for ALL performing musical artists. Readers who comment on this report make the point that probably the lion's share of live performance income goes to the enterprises of the very biggest musical stars. Anecdotes portray the desperate difficulty with which many lesser-known entertainers struggle just to break even by relying upon performance income.

I will not try to analyze the implications all this has for the nuturing of new musical performers and compositions. Surely there will always be some income for those who create and perform new advertising jingles, protest songs, vanity compositions for the exclusive pleasure of the wealthy or special occasions like weddings, and the like. It's not terribly clear to a Phillistine(?) like me that the rest of us will terribly miss the diminution of other NEW musical art, given the VAST ARCHIVE of recorded music from around the world which has already escaped, or in only a few decades will escape, the bonds of legal copyright protection - to say nothing of the practical copyright protections I lament (as a matter of justice) they have already lost through technological advances.

But what are the implications for our dear friend Alizée, who remains a star - but hardly a superstar? To take a number out of a hat, say she has 100,000 fans around the world who would pay to attend her live performance, if it was given more or less in their community. It can still be problematic to find any place where at least 1,000 of them can come together at one time in person! And the smaller your box office, the less of an unmediated live show you can produce at one venue at a time, even if you are willing to work for little.

Having almost never attended any live, unmediated entertainment myself - concerts, theater, sports, political rallies, etc. - I am not the best person to ask about the appeal of in-person attendance at some event. That said, I very much enjoy Alizée's En Concert DVD (for which I was happy to pay, even if its entire contents were too easily available illicitly.)

But you see, the En Concert DVD is the OPPOSITE of a live, unmediated event - it is a highly-edited recording! Sure, the "live" interaction of the star with the fans is part of its appeal - but to a DVD viewer, they are simply "extras," and extras who have not even worked for free - they have paid for the privilege! Note also, my personal pleasure in watching it would not diminish if the crowd was entirely synthesized, rather than only partly so, or not at all. (As yet, we still cannot do a decent job of synthesizing the clear natural voice of a real singer - but the sound and appearance of a crowd is something else.)

And please note that the audio and video quality I enjoy via a DVD is, at least potentially, aesthetically superior to what is available to a random attendee even in the most luxurious theatrical setting. If you electronically mediate a performance and give everyone their own hidef screen and headphones, they can all sit in front row center - and even enjoy dramatic visual stereo, even without glasses.

All video productions live under the shadow of creeping Napsterism. But at least mass-market productions are cheap enough per capita to be supported by advertising, product placement and modest viewing fees, which for now holds at bay much illegal copying. Narrow-interest productions like the show of a particular musical star are not that lucky, unless maybe the star is a superstar.

Webcasts are nothing special these days, but since at least the 1990s, a nontrivial number of cinema theaters in the developed world have enjoyed satellite down-links and electronic projectors, whereby an event produced in one city can be reproduced live in many other cities; for example, to host a stockholder conference or corporate training session. I myself attended these when I subscribed to the Microsoft Developer Network. By 1996, there was enough Internet deployment to start Webcasting these particular Microsoft events, called WorldWide Live, (see http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-18488694.html ) but the theaters remained essential venues for years to come; the live broadcast on July 16, 1996 was sent to more than 50 movie theaters in major U.S. and Canadian cities.

<table width="75%" align="center" cellpadding="10" border="10"><tr><td><center><big><big>Digital projectors in US cinema theaters</big></big></center>
On March 21, 2007, NPR reported<blockquote>For at least seven years, film studios and theaters have been hyping digital projectors and the crisp, clear picture quality they will bring to movie screens... Despite the economic and visual advantages of digital projection, out of the nation's more than 38,000 movie screens, only around 2,200 have digital projectors.</blockquote>On February 15, 2010, the Wall Street Journal wrote<blockquote>As of the beginning of the year, less than 10% of the U.S.'s roughly 40,000 screens were 3-D enabled, according to the National Association of Theatre Owners.</blockquote>On August 2, 2010, The New York Times wrote<blockquote>By year’s end, there will be more than 5,000 digital screens in the United States, or 12.5 percent of the roughly 40,000 total, easing a traffic jam... [for] ...3-D hits...</blockquote>On February 8, 2010, NPR hosted Jon Forman, president of Cleveland Cinemas, who said<blockquote>To convert a traditional, 35-millimeter auditorium that shows films using celluloid, it's about $100,000 investment and that's give or take depending on the kind of equipment you use and the whistles and bells, but it's less if you're just converting to 2-D digital.</blockquote></td></tr></table>
In the years since then, while theatrical electronic projector deployment has continued, its pace has remained cautious, as has the very recent deployment of electronic projectors supporting visual stereo. But such venues do exist, and one can aggregate multiple sites as a large virtual theater enjoying a common live entertainment feed. Such a network would allow one to aggregate an audience of thousands at one time, all seated in comfort with superior visual and auditory accommodation, even if only hundreds could be gathered at any one of the individual locations. This is not a new idea, as you can confirm at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropo...finition_video which writes in part the following:<blockquote>Beginning on December 30, 2006, as part of the company's effort to build revenues and attract new audiences, the [Metropolitan Opera Association of New York City] ...broadcast a series of six performances live via satellite into movie theaters called 'Metropolitan Opera: Live in HD'.... The series was carried in over 100 movie theaters across North America, Japan, Britain and several other European countries... The Met reports that 91% of available seats were sold for the HD performances. According to General Manager Peter Gelb, there were 60, 000 people in cinemas around the world watching the March 24 transmission... The New York Times reported that 324,000 tickets were sold worldwide for the 2006/07 season, while each simulcast cost $850,000 to $1 million to produce... [Note that with such an extravagant production budget, one needed about $20 a seat to break even.]

The 2007/08 season...planned to broadcast to double the number of theaters in the US as the previous season, as well as to additional countries such as Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. The number of participating venues in the US, which includes movie theatre chains as well as independent theatres and some college campus venues, [was] 343... By the end of the season 920,000 people attended the 8 screenings bringing in a gross of $13.3 million from North America and $5 million from overseas. [i.e. about $20 per capita.]</blockquote>By undertaking this program, the Met not only did an end-run around long-delayed HTDV deployment, but possibly was able to extract a much larger revenue per viewer than otherwise possible, due to the highly chaperoned environment of the theaters, where the creation of an illicit video copy of the productions could be effectively prevented, defeating Napsterism. (The Met now also supports a fee-based Internet VoD service, using a proprietary player, which in the final analysis - beyond script-kiddyism - allows pirating of its content.)

Surely Alizée and many of her peers could not attract over 100,000 viewers per show like the Met did, but it is not idle fancy to imagine one could use economical encrypted terrestrial Internet streams, and a MUCH more modest production budget, and scale down this kind of effort, making it financially plausible for hosting the far more modest live concerts of individual artists.

And that is to say nothing of the idea of creating a non-live high-def concert movie shown ONLY in theaters, for the sole purpose of trying to prevent piratical copying. (For some years it has been a felony in the US to illicitly photograph a movie shown in a commercial theater.) At least a few years ago, Disney continued to do limited theatrical-only showings of certain of its film classics, presumably for just such reasons. I also remind you that a concert movie, as an edited product, can be of enormously better quality than a live event - even with idyllic live seating - because a non-live event can do things like removing (or creating!) flubs, multi-track recording a performer, etc. No wonder it is common for "live" acts to lip-sync studio productions!

Of course, a mediated concert, even if live, is still not "in the flesh." One cannot throw any teddy bears on the stage the performer is using - but neither can one launch any bullets that way either. (It would not be that hard to let remote audience members throw virtual teddy bears, flowers, etc. if they were willing to pay extra to lease a wireless game controller and augmented reality was used to present the remote live performance. See a related event of recent years described at: http://www.redorbit.com/news/technol...ual/index.html )

I will concede it would not be possible to shake hands with, or smell the body-impelled perfume of a remotely located performer. (I would not buy authenticated vials of body fluid, like saliva, posted in advance to the remote venues, but neither will I condemn fans or performers who engage in such commerce. Um, did I hear Lily Allen cough?) Yet such constraints do not prevent deploying return feeds of the remote sites back to the performer, simulating a monolithic venue, nor the much more intimate possibility of adjunct séance sessions, whereby a few lucky members of the audience at each venue, drawn by lot, could enjoy a short live visual stereo videoconference with the performer, who could personalize CDs, DVDs or other merchandise they buy, for shipment at a later date. And surely you've seen films like Forest Gump. Should you want your photo taken with the entertainer, they need not be in your room for such to be fabricated! Heck, one could even make a video recording of your entire genuine séance interaction, posted online at a place only you can download.

One should also point out that if a performer creates an elaborate show with a large stage and backstage staff and lots of heavy, fancy gear, it becomes very expensive to move all that stuff from place to place to do shows. But a single performer and manager could make the same trips some date after an electronic show for far less money, and attend catered parties open to the audience members at each respective site, for an appropriate additional admission fee.

Imagine it - A theatrical concert in Paris before a small live audience, with live hidef stereo video feeds to Mexico City, Lyon, Brussels, Toulouse, Marseille, Nantes, Lille, Nice, Bordeaux - and maybe even Moscow, Berlin and New York City. The most problematic aspect could be the time-zone differences, which likely land up putting Mexico City and New York City together in a separate show. Couldn't you imagine yourself attending such a show, especially if (allowing that you might be evil) you knew there would never be a video copy of it you could illicitly acquire for free via the Internet - or maybe even buy for years to come? This might well be the way second-tier stars could soon access the live performance opportunities not available at any single location which could make their careers very profitable.