“You can’t be in touring and not know that people are not selling records these days,” Steve McCale of LMG 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. The solution, dubbed TourCATT (Tour Content Acquisition and Transfer Technology), is content. 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.
—Dan Daley, from The Biz, PLSN, May 2009
