Almost everything in the live entertainment business has been transformed by digital technology. But as much digital gear as lighting, projection and staging companies carry already, there may be yet one more level of transformation to go in the near future. LMG has carved out a significant niche for itself providing integrated lighting, sound, projection video and staging services for the corporate event sector since Les Goldberg founded it in 1984 in Orlando. It’s grown since then to 175 employees and branches in Las Vegas and Phoenix with a $40 million technology inventory.
Corporate events are quickly becoming an endangered species, thanks to the recession, and LMG added a live touring division last year when, serendipitously, Avril Lavigne asked Jim Yabuski, a long-time road FOH engineer with artists like Van Halen and Matchbox 20 and more recently an engineer at LMG, to do sound for her Best Damn Thing tour last year. They’ve since parlayed that into handling all lighting and media servers for Grammy winner Lil Wayne’s current tour, and sound and projection for artists including Blue October and We the Kings on current tours.
Touring with CATT
That’s a good but not unusual tactical move. What set it apart, though, was adding one additional layer to the proposition. LMG hired Steve McCale, former manager of Clair Bros. in Nashville, to formulate another tier of service for the division, aimed at touring music artists that were using the company’s other services.
“You can’t be in touring and not know that people are not selling records these days,” McCale says. What he set out to do was develop a way, using the company’s current technology base, to help clients better leverage their tours, in the process creating potentially new revenue streams for them and LMG.
In brief, the solution, dubbed TourCATT (Tour Content Acquisition and Transfer Technology), is content. “We’re out with an artist with video cameras and sound recording equipment just by the fact that we’re on tour with them,” McCale explains. “We can capture content from the stage, but we can take that further; we can follow the artist backstage, on a shopping trip, anywhere. There’s a constant stream of content that we can capture for them, post it, mix it, store it, and send it where it can make them some money.”
It’s a Twitter World After All
In a Twitter-ized culture, the idea of being able to provide professionally recorded video and audio and ship it to fans on a daily or even hourly basis via streaming sounds attractive. But it is fraught with potential legal issues. That’s why McCale decided that LMG’s interaction with any content they capture for clients stop at the point of delivery to the client or their designated distributor or destination. Instead, McCale can point them to a growing array of Internet-based media distribution propositions like Topspin Media, MyContent.com and New Found Frequency’s Alive Drive, an interactive operating system that is embedded onto virtually any flash memory device. Concertgoers buy or are given a flash drive with Alive Drive’s software, which acts as a back-door key for Internet connectivity to the artist’s Web site and the additional content created by LMG, which can be downloaded or streamed to any digital media player.
“We’re leveraging LMG’s technology base and our experience doing exactly this for corporate clients,” says McCale, noting that those types of events increasingly implement live streaming for shareholder and analyst meetings and immediate downloads of video and data at the end of press conferences and other events.
Performing artists have recorded their own content before, from live albums to the nightly videos some thespian divas have been known to vet rigorously after the curtain comes down. What kept it from going much beyond that for decades was the fear of piracy, of the console mix becoming a bootleg album. But yesterday’s bootleg is today’s viral marketing campaign. Now, the demand for and the space to put content — from Twitter to cloud computing — is outstripping the conventional sources. Plenty of younger artists have addressed that, incessantly recording and streaming themselves to their fans, but most of it looks pretty God-awful, and an HDcam at 2 a.m. after two encores and five drinks only makes matters worse. There is a market out there that wants professionally captured content, though many of them don’t know it yet and might think they can’t afford it if they do. If the price is right, LMG Touring’s idea is a good fit. They just might have to run it at a deficit till some scale can be achieved.
Let it Flo
And on a larger level, the idea of the one-stop shop has become more prevalent in many industries as companies realize the benefits to their clients and themselves of creating vertical service infrastructures. Sound companies add lights, lighting companies add sound. LMG has had one client thus far for this new service that it rolled out just last November — rapper Flo Rida’s record release party on April 3 was streamed live from Miami, a six-camera shoot by LMG, which also provided the satellite uplink, with streaming by Limewire.com and available for later download through Limewire servers. But it does show that there is another tier that can be addressed in the vertical chain, one that points the way to where live performances are going to go anyway.
