May Issue - FOH Online

The music industry has always had
an ambiguous relationship with
Clear Channel — you may have
disliked their practices, but no one could
deny their influence and ubiquity. The
live sound community especially has had
an intense link with what had once been
the 600-pound gorilla of the concert production
business. When Clear Channel
tired of some of its entertainment holdings
and spun off the concert production
business in December 2005 in the form
of Live Nation, a couple of interesting
strings remained connected. One of those
strings just got resolved — sort of — and
it really underscores just how important
the live music industry has become to
the entertainment sector overall.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation
(EFF) is a high-tech civil liberties organization
— think ACLU with a soldering
iron. When Live Nation launched its after-concert
CD duplicating business in
2006 — which we’ve written about in
this space before — it did so with what it
asserted was proprietary technology for
automatically loading, burning and distributing
the finished discs when the last
note of the show was still ringing.
Or did they? One of the emotional
strings that seemed to come along with
the Live Nation spin-off was a tendency to
try to bully the market a bit. That’s what the
EFF alleged that Clear Channel/Live Nation
tried to do when it applied for a patent for
the technology and used the application’s
pending status to try to block other similar
ventures to record and sell CDs of concerts
by others. (There’s some more ambiguity
We’re On
To Something Here
By DanDaley
Two industry deals get worked out, but maybe not in the way planned. . .
— the intellectual property at issue here
predated the Live Nation spin-off.
Apparently, a court has agreed. The
U.S. Patent and Trademark Office announced
in March it would revoke the
patent held by Clear Channel Communications.
According to the EFF attorney Jason
Schultz, the patent asserted by Clear
Channel would have created a monopoly
on all-in-one technologies that produce
post-concert digital recordings, and that
Clear Channel threatened to sue those
who made such recordings. “This locked
musical acts into using Clear Channel
technology and blocked innovations by
others,” he says.
In fact, the EFF continued in a press
release, its own investigation of the patent
claims found that Telex had in fact
developed similar technology more than
a year before Clear Channel filed its patent
request. “EFF asked the PTO to revoke
the patent based on this and other…
evidence,” the release states.
Role Change TB
Live music events are no strangers to
litigation and copyright issues. But what’s
different here is the scale. Large corporations
like Live Nation and AEG have
identified live music events as a reliable
revenue generator at a time when prerecorded
music continues a six-year sales
slide. It argues for a reconsideration of
what the central technical person in the
mix — the FOH engineer — is and can
be. Many record labels are headed by record
producers — Jimmy Iovine, Ron Fair
and Jack Joseph Puig are just a few of
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continued from page 24
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the first-chair people who currently occupy
executive positions at major labels.
But I’m wracking my brains here trying
to think of one live-sound mixer that has
gone beyond a business card-fronted
consultancy to the executive suite at a
pro audio equipment manufacturer. Or,
for that matter, a record label.
I think this could change. I think it
needs to and that it would be a good
thing. If the music industry is going to
put greater emphasis on live events (and
evidence show that they already have
— a 2002 study by Princeton economics
professor Alan Krueger showed that
31 of the 35 top-grossing music artists
made more money from concerts than
from record sales), it makes sense for
those with trench-level experience in
making them happen to ultimately move
into positions to help direct the course
of the industry.
NSCA
TB
There was NSCA show coverage in
April’s FOH, but one thing worth noting
here was a conversation with Jeff Lowry,
the marketing manager for SLS Audio.
SLS was noted here last year for what I
thought was a prescient move: a product
integration deal by which they provided
the highly visibly branded sound system
The Biz
for reality show Rockstar. Like any product
placement, the move cost the company
a chunk of change, but Lowry says it
has already returned on the investment.
Not, however, quite as planned.
The move hoped to increase brand
awareness of SLS’s consumer offering,
the Q-Line of home theatre speakers
developed with Quincy Jones. The Q-
Line is still out there, selling through a
network of smaller distributors after a
deal with mega-retailer Best Buy didn’t
work out as planned. But Lowry says
the biggest dividends have come on
the pro side. “Professionals knew our
technology; now, they know the products,
too,” he says. “Rockstar worked
out well for that.”
The convergence of professional
products and the “lifestyle” of pop
culture is real and it’s effective. The
entre nous aspect of any professional
community is always going to be important,
from training to simple socializing.
But companies fail to recognize
at their own risk that when it comes to
entertainment technologies, the line
that defines what’s pro and what’s not
is getting blurrier by the day.
Clear things up with ddaley@fohonline.com.
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