Concert Socialcaster DeepRockDrive to Publicly Launch at CES
Erick Schonfeld
30 comments »
Update: Free tickets for Tuesday’s shows featuring The Maine and Big B are available to the first 200 TechCrunch readers to send an e-mail to techcrunch at deeprockdrive dot com.
While the future of the music industry may not be in selling albums, there is still hope for the concert side of the business. Danny Socolof and Jeff Henshaw think they can bring concerts onto the Web with their startup DeepRockDrive. Socolof is a veteran music marketer and Henshaw hails from Microsoft, where he was on the Xbox team. With DeepRockDrive, they want to film concerts in their high-tech Las Vegas soundstage, broadcast them live over the Web, and sell tickets for $6.99 each, splitting the proceeds with the musicians.
The startup—which has raised $3 million in angel funding from Socolof, Henshaw, David Goldberg (founder of Launch Media and the first GM of Yahoo Music), Bill Curbishley (manager of The Who and Robert Plant), and the Becker Family (Brian Becker is the former CEO of Live Nation)—has already quietly recorded and broadcast 45 shows since last September. That was its beta period. Now, on Tuesday, it will be launching itself in a more public fashion with a concert coinciding with the Consumer Electronics Show (which is taking place in Las Vegas next week). It plans on filming more than 100 shows in 2008, plus free promotional shows every Friday.
Here is how it works. The band plays in the soundstage (with or without a live audience). The shows are filmed with five Sony HD cameras, and each Web viewer can pick which camera angle he or she wants to watch. The audience can also vote on the order of the songs on the set list or make their own song requests. They can also send in messages during the show that the band sees on large screens surrounding the stage. Prior to shows (DeepRockDrive calls them socialcasts), bands try to drum up support with digital posters on their Websites and MySpace pages that fans can take and put on their own Web pages. On DeepRockDrive, fans can petition for concerts from their favorite bands, like this one for Flight of the Conchords. If the shows get enough votes, it makes it easier for the bands to decide to fly to Las Vegas to record the show.
While the experience of watching a live show on your computer screen will never match actually being at a live concert, DeepRockDrive is offering a distributed fan base an opportunity to watch a show from bands that might never otherwise come to their towns. For instance, Australian rocker Shannon Noll is going to do a DeepRockDrive concert aimed at expat Australian fans in the U.S. Declares Socolof:
The future of the music business will be hundreds of thousands of artists that have fan bases of between 5,000 to 100,000, not 50 artists that have one million or more.
Socolof is also talking to music labels (both indies and the majors) about possible joint ventures. Traditionally, labels did not have much to do with the concert side of the business, but that is changing. Predicts Socolof:
In the old world, yes, concerts were separate from the labels. In the new world, there will be a different approach in the partnership between labels and their artists. Labels will need to contribute more to the success of their artists.
Maybe. I don’t think the artists want to start splitting concert fees with the labels. Socolof is also not opposed to rewarding fans who turn out to be the biggest promoters of shows, although there is no mechanism yet for them to be rewarded. (Free tickets for anyone who generates a certain amount of sales wouldn’t be a bad start. Flying the biggest fans/promoters in for the show would be even better).
DeepRockDive is starting small. Its socialcasts can support only a few thousand simultaneous viewers right now. That will grow to tens of thousands in a few months. “Our goal is a million front row seats,” says Socolof. Hey, the guy is a music promoter.
Here is an archived video of a band called Socratic. It starts off slow, but you get a sense of what the performance space looks like with large screens filled with live messages from the Web audience:
rock on
if i had a warehouse or similar venue, a projector, and some speakers, i’d stream shows from places like imusiccast and deeprockdrive to let kids mosh when there arent any good shows in town.
there will always be a business giving kids a way to get out of the house when their parents are in bed.
As an Aussie, I wish to apologize in advance for inflicting Shannon Noll on the rest of the world. He is one of the Australian Idol contestants that didn’t win but got a record deal anyway.
I like the idea of Deep Rock Drive. I too have been playing with a similar idea here in Australia. I have built a sound stage in a large warehouse and fit it out with a multi-camera capture and edit suite - using 8 cameras (4 hi-def and 4 xl2’s). It’s cost me small fortune so far (ie I could have paid of my mortgage already). Early days yet.
This is really cool! I love the DeepRockDrive shows. It is still early days but the shows are top notch and a ton of fun.
Super exciting!!!
I love the idea and would love to know how much bandwidth they are going to burn with HD feeds. I take they are going to offer these shows for sale afterwards for fans that didn’t make it. Also who will own the rights to the recordings?
This is an incredible idea. I have past experience with trying to start a small label with a group of artists and I am still very good friends with one of the artists who is thinking about taking advantage of the new media avenues that we did not have 10 years ago.
This is a very powerful statement that should be inspiring to any aspiring artist:
“The future of the music business will be hundreds of thousands of artists that have fan bases of between 5,000 to 100,000, not 50 artists that have one million or more.”
Everyone knows that the most money is made is from concerts & performances.
I know that my friend would be extremely happy to be able to pay his rent with his music. This and the growing access to affordable tools to produce and record your own music without a huge studio will help artists with real talent stickout from those who simply have a PR machine behind them.
Wow, I came to post about iMusicast and the second commenter mentioned it. I thought nobody had heard of it!
Well, guess what? iMusicast used a VERY similar idea, though their shows were broadcast for free and they had about 1/10th the budget. Still, even with relatively popular bands - Reel Big Fish, Zebrahead, the Matches, Plain White T’s (pre-”Hey Delilah”), Melee, Suburban Legends, Sugarcult, and more - they couldn’t break even through ticket sales and nearly nobody watched online. Then again, their production and post production weren’t great; the video edit was always what had been cut live during the broadcast, and the audio for streaming was mixed without being totally isolated from the live room.
Perhaps iMusicast failed because they were trying a bottom-up strategy. Or perhaps they didn’t have high enough production quality. Or perhaps it’s just a bad idea that will suck up money and waste a lot of musicians’ time for the next twenty years. Who knows?
I went to probably 25 shows there, and played there three or four times in two different bands.
This is in Oakland, CA for those of you unfamiliar.
What happens when kids start dissing the band on the message board? Will the bands need to go through the “you suck” thread?
Besides that, sounds like a great idea to me. The lack of crowd noise is quite weird though.
i’ve been part of the beta testing for awhile now, and i’m loving it!
it’s a great way that someone from AUSTRALIA {like me} will get to see bands “live” that will never tour down here. and most of the time the streaming has been perfect.
and so far the “interaction” via the shout out on the screens has been very much of the LOVE FEST type. hopefully the youtube style haters will stay away…
i think the potential for DRD is massive, i’m a big fan!
@Darren, they record in HD but don’t stream in HD. They use Akamai and stream at the highest quality that most of its audience will be able o view it in, which will improve over time.
Soon the company also plans to offer an on-demand option for archived videos, at a lower price than the live shows. I am not sure how many people will pay for those—seems like they could make more money with an advertising model on the archived stuff.
@Aaron, yeah, we’ll see. It all depends on the bands they get, and the production quality.
this is a joke right?
This is an interesting idea. I bet there was some meeting where the the big record company hotshots heard about it and said, “Nah, it’ll never work.”
That’s what a group of AT&T execs said about 20 years ago about cell phones.
Looks like their venture capital backers got in for a small sum. A company to watch.
Yeah, great idea. Then maybe I can get a cup of joe at the local Starbucks. Keep all these kids in front of a desktop nd stop hanging there. yeah, that’s it. Then they won’t even need their cars. Hey this idea is cool. Who knows, maybe they will all just stay home from school and watch their fav bands on the web. Man, think of all the tax dollars we could save. Let’s find more ways to keep the kids glued to their computers. yeah, that’s it.
( eyeroll)
I’m not a close follower of the music industry, but this sounds potentially revolutionary to me. I think of concerts as an expensive hassle but I like the concert videos on YouTube despite their atrocious quality, and would pay for a tv-like experience (especially for nerd faves like the National and Jens Lekman, who would probably be well represented).
It seems like a great way to convert fan interest into artist $ with minimal frictional cost. The wave of the future, I tell yas!
I’ve seen this same concept in several venues across the US… this idea isn’t new, and it just doesn’t work. Watching a live concert on your computer is a terrible experience. Yaaaaawn… you can drop these guys in the deadpool now and save your time writing a second post about them when they run out of money.
I can’t believe no one blogged about http://www.phototube.us
“@Aaron, yeah, we’ll see. It all depends on the bands they get, and the production quality.”
Well, no, that’s not true. It also depends on whether it’s a viable idea or not.
If the problem with iMusicast was just that it was the wrong time (possible given the state of broadband by the time iMusicast shut its doors nearly two and a half years ago) then this shouldn’t have a problem. But I think there’s more to it than that - the most people viewing a live stream at a given time at iCast peaked somewhere around ten even for the biggest shows.
There’s something about the internet that has never inspired people to get online at a specific time for an event. Maybe you can cram 100 die-hard fans in if you promise them that the band will read their messages and respond, but aside from that the internet is about getting content at your leisure and probably for free. I can already find concert videos that scratch my concert video itch on youtube, and I don’t really care that the video and audio quality is poor because, with a few exceptions, live concert videos aren’t shot or mixed well anyway. The example in the above post is no different - the mix is fairly dry, lacking in any kind of character or sense of space, and the video is uninteresting, boringly lit, unimaginatively edited, and with a band trying to feign enthusiasm to an imaginary audience.
Why would I spend so much time on this topic? Because I spent nearly four years going to a venue that did the exact same thing. The venue became a popular hangout spot for lots of local teens, a great consistent all-ages venue… and then went out of business.
That said, if this works and the company is making millions in six months, you can print out this post and feed it to me on stage at the next TC40 event. With garlic.
I always wondered what happened to Clay Aiken. Now he fronts Socratic. Thanks for the update.
“There’s something about the internet that has never inspired people to get online at a specific time for an event. Maybe you can cram 100 die-hard fans in if you promise them that the band will read their messages and respond, but aside from that the internet is about getting content at your leisure and probably for free. I can already find concert videos that scratch my concert video itch on youtube, and I don’t really care that the video and audio quality is poor because, with a few exceptions, live concert videos aren’t shot or mixed well anyway.”
Hi, Aaron. I’m the CTO and co-founder of DeepRockDrive. I was intrigued when I read your thoughts on the viability of the idea behind DeepRockDrive, particularly about people’s reluctance to be online at a particular time. You’re spot-on about broadcast content not being enough of a draw to collect masses of people at a particular time! You mentioned later in your comment that you can easily get your concert fix on YouTube. That’s the case for any straight video event, where “watching” is all you do. There’s no reason to tune in at a particular time, much less PAY for the pleasure, if you can get exactly the same experience later on, at a time of your choosing, for free. There is so much recorded/broadcast content out there on the ‘net at no cost that one can passively watch for free at any time and still be relatively satisfied.
Broadcasting isn’t what DeepRockDrive is all about. Where we’re putting all of our creative energy is into creating interactive experiences. The reason to buy a ticket and to tune into a DeepRockDrive concert at a particular time is that you’ll get an experience with the artist and with the other fans that goes way beyond just watching. One of our ultimate measures of success is getting people sitting up, leaning forward, hands on the keyboard and mouse as they really interact with the artist and with the show itself. Switching camera angles in real-time, shouting out to the artists, and throwing animated applause onto bigscreens in the studio are proving incredibly popular during the shows, and since it’s all software and internet services, the sky is the limit of where we can take the interactivity.
In a previous life, I worked on Xbox Live. One doesn’t think about “watching Xbox Live” so much as they think about getting online and playing with or against friends in their favorite games. The passion around that interactivity leads people to say, “Hey, I’ll meetcha on Xbox Live at 9:00 after I finish my homework.” People schedule events, because they will have other people there with them to interact with. That’s the feeling that we want to bring to live interactive concerts at DeepRockDrive. People won’t tune in to watch; they’ll tune in to interact.
We definitely ARE working hard to make the broadcast technology the very best you’ll find on the web. For live events, I think we’re really leading in terms of quality. There are some example clips up at http://www.deeprockdrive.com/highlights that you can check out (for free…anytime you feel like it ;-). But to get a feel for DeepRockDrive’s real focus - the interactivity - there’s nothing like a live show. We’re going to be doing free live shows every Friday in order to give everyone the chance to check it out and decide for themselves if it’s worth tuning in at a specific time for.
Thanks again for the thoughts.
Jeff (http://www.deeprockdrive.com/member/dingo)
CTO, DeepRockDrive
create a twitter account and get thousands of followers to let them know when these concerts are happening, offer them prizes and swag for participating, draw them to the performances. Bands would have to perform a few songs in a row to not loose audience attention, it could get very tedious watching them read the text off the screen.
Probably a large number of social media accounts all driving viewers to the concerts would work. but standalone , i dunno, and $7 is too much to hear overcompressed audio IMO. That clip example sounds flat and undynamic, poor mix. good band. just not happy with the sound.
“create a twitter account and get thousands of followers to let them know when these concerts are happening,”
@scottwitter:
http://twitter.com/DeepRockDrive
Jeff (http://www.deeprockdrive.com/member/dingo)
CTO, DeepRockDrive
Brilliant idea, DRD. Looking forward to watching its progress in the next weeks and months. Congrats to the staff for its hard work, diligence; and if the recent Chris Burke concert is any indication of the greatness of what’s going on, the future of this company is BRIGHT indeed
I think the idea has a good amount of potential…for fans outside of the US. How many bands non-US are currently touring that Americans would go see? Not very many! American artists dominate the charts across the world. If this website can cater to and find the Chili Pepper fans in Europe, Asia, etc, the sky is the limit.
As an American, I might go catch a Pearl Jam show on DRD sometime. Still, I’d much, MUCH rather pay 50 bucks for the real thing (when the real thing is available to me..) than $6.99 to sit at my computer for a “badass concert experience”
Danny and Co,
Good luck ! this is a wonderful idea and I have no doubt it will succeed!
This kind of project demands multi disciplinary capabilities.
I have met the team several times and they are really a unique combination of talent, skill and wisdom in Music and Tech.
I have seen several projects in this space, but non with a team of that caliber !
keep on the great work ! We’ll be promoting !
this is a great idea, and other sites are just starting to show live concerts: fabchannel in Europe….
to DeepRockDrive: please send an e-mail to NowHound. the site is a LiveCast Search Engine…currently close but Beta shortly…
you could have searched and found a dozen live concerts around the world…starting at lunchtime in NYC for shows in Amsterdam..
a great way to get your shows publicity and viewers…..
and keep pushing the music industry in the right direction
DRD has their act together. The one thing that is always failed the be mentioned is that the 6.99 tickets is split 50/50 with the band and drd picks up all production costs.
For a band to walk out with a HD 5 camera master in 5.1 dolby audio is amazing.
Ive been in bands, i run a label, and a real live venue. I truly think this is the future. From start to finsh the broadcasts are top notch movie quality.
the video clips dont do the sound justice, a live show on DRD cant be matched by CD, even on my crappy 30$ speakers
Concept is Good - Business Model may need work. I would not pay $6.99 to watch, but I bet there are a bunch of sponsors and advertisers that will pay $6.99 per person for the verified name and email address of the people who like, watch and participate with the featured artist - DRD, you guys hiring?