Tour revenues:
fans at the end of a gig, even if they’re only paying 50p for something on the night.”
LIVE IT UP Adam Mardell heads up Live Band Audio – a newcomer to the post-gig arena, where the focus will be on ‘USB on the night’ services. The company can deliver product just minutes after the event via its state-of- the-art portable studio set-up. “We don’t take feeds from
Depeche Mode on tour: Abbey Road’s Live Here Now accompanied the band on two tours, 90 dates, and some fans bought ALL the post-gig CDs
to physical CD sales across the entire industry (65%),” he says. “USB has benefits in terms of turnaround speed, but it’s not a valid consumer proposition anymore due to the cost of production.” Concert Live has been in
business since 2005 and reports a current output of around 50 productions a year. The operation is currently in the midst of recording Robbie Williams’ European tour, which Goodyer estimates will cost the company £700,000 for all 30 shows. How then, does it make that money back? “The one thing we don’t do is
take copyright,” Goodyer replies. “We cover all costs, then we arrange with the artist either some kind of profit share split after costs recouped or we get a guaranteed royalty on each unit sold; it varies from job to job.” The Concert Live set-up consists of two trucks: one houses a recording studio, the other is a mobile duplication studio with banks of networked CD burners. Taking a Williams show as an example, 500 individual drives burn 500 copies every two minutes, and Concert Live will shift approximately 3,000 units a night – a unit in this case is a pre- packaged triple CD (£20 retail), two discs contain the live concert and the third is a free ‘digital encore’ to download when you get home. (Rapid turnaround is one thing; working miracles, such as burning several thousand discs of the encores in a few seconds, is a little beyond their powers.) But Concert Live is going
beyond the realms of downloads; its latest idea, which
34 l PSNLIVE 2013 BEEN THERE, BOUGHT THE T-SHIRT!
It seems that no matter what kind of advanced on the night services are on offer at a live gig, the real money is always made on basic merchandise. According to Deep Purple’s keyboard tech and self-confessed part-time ‘merch monkey’, Mike Airey, Blink 182 took £68,000 in one day at Reading Festival a couple of years back... just from t-shirts!
“It’s absolutely commonplace for bands like Blink 182, Iron Maiden and Metallica to make that kind of money on t-shirts alone,” Airey says, stating that the current merch trend is to personalise clothing for each individual show. “I worked on the Muse gig at Emirates Stadium recently, and everything had a London tag to it; people love it, and from the artist’s point of view, you’re bypassing the record company a lot
has been road-tested at the Williams shows ahead of a big push in September, is direct-to- device, which sends the live gig directly to punters’ phones just seconds after the performance, for half the price of a CD (£10.99). Concert Live has already seen 25% additional pick-up from these digital sales. “Thanks to improved connectivity nowadays, we can bring a network into a venue which allows us to transfer a lot of data very, very quickly; as soon as 30,000 people get inside, your 3G phone signal dies, so direct-to-device combats that by combining that networking technology with what our core business is: creating the content very quickly and at a very high quality,” he explains. “We support the digital side by deploying ‘face-to-face’ staff that can explain the concept and share the fans’ excitement.”
Mike Airey: would you buy a t-shirt from this man?
of the time, so you’re taking a much bigger piece of the pie.
“It’s kind of the same for the smaller bands like my band, Impact, too. We sell CDs on the night rather than generate downloads or USBs, but the real revenue comes via the posters, badges, hoodies and t-shirts. We rely heavily on merchandise; in fact, if you don’t sell
any, you feel let down – either that or you know you’ve just had a really crap gig!”
Sean Hughes, tour manager for UK pop artist, Karen Louise, concurs: “In terms of making any revenue at our live shows, it’s always 80% merch: t-shirts, badges, that kind of thing; and then there’s your CD sales on top of that.”
“What if you could build your fanbase by delivering digital media directly to them on the night?” Adam Goodyer, Concert Live
However, Goodyer says it’s
only now that this kind of ‘disruptive technology’ is showing its true potential. “All merch will be digital in the near future, which is why we think this is such an exciting market. Why do people buy a t-shirt? To say ‘I was there’ – it’s a memento and shows a closeness to the band. But it could all be done much better digitally,” he states,
boldly. Take your local band playing in a pub, he reasons: if there are only five people watching, you can’t afford to make t-shirts for those five punters. You could sell them CDs perhaps – but that’s no longer exciting either. “What if you could build your direct customer fanbase selling digital media and delivering it directly to those five people? Suddenly, you have five real
front-of-house; we mic up everything entirely and it’s then mixed wholly for the home user,” Mardell explains. “We can cater for up to 48 channels and we set up a bit like a broadcast team would, taking the splits from the stage; all of the inputs come into one box.” Post-gig, Mardell and his team has the capability to deliver between 300 and 400 USBs, complete with track listings, in just three to four minutes. Impressive, certainly, but what about the audio quality? “Yes, it’s compressed to MP3
format, but we have done a lot of A-B tests coming straight out of our [DiGiCo SD8] console at 48kHz, and we feel the audio is of a high enough standard. I’ve worked in plenty of big studios, so I know what to listen for; and many of my engineer friends listen to it too, which is good enough for me,” he says. “Although we haven’t sold 300 or 400 in one hit as yet, our testing has proved that we have the capability to churn them out at that rate, which is really encouraging.” Typically, Mardell will meet with the band he’s working with pre-gig to discuss what they want to achieve from the recording, then they go into a joint venture of sorts, which he feels is the fairest and most cost-effective way of working with musicians. “We don’t charge to come out to the gigs or for the recording itself, we just agree to a percentage of sales,” he says. “From the band’s perspective, it’s in their interest to sell more USBs, which works for us, too; I mean, even an extra 50 or 100 quid per show is important to artists these days – it might pay for a hotel room, for example. It’s all about working with the artist as much as possible.” For further flexibility, in the
next few weeks, punters will also be able to download these recorded shows directly from Live Band Audio’s website, much in the same way as you might download a film off from LoveFilm or Netflix. A phone app would be the logical next step. “That’s the end goal,
absolutely,” agree Mardell, enthusiastically. “At the moment we’re concentrating solely on
www.psneurope.com
Pic: Lousie Stickland,
Loosplat.com.Ltd
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