YouTube + Twitter = New Concert Experience
December 3, 2009 by
This past year, we’ve observed a growing trend of live streaming concerts online at popular social media sites such as YouTube and Facebook. All of these concerts were free to watch, including big name music artists like U2 and Alicia Keys.
Why do such well-known, mega-successful bands do this sort of thing when they can easily draw huge crowds of fans willing to pay good money for tickets? Believe it or not, there is a method to the madness.
The concert itself serves as an advertisement for the artist, a way to reconnect with their old fans while attracting a new generation of fans to their music. It puts their unique brand in front of more eyeballs, which is never a bad thing.
For an extra marketing boost, the show can be scheduled to occur on the day the band's newest album hits stores online and offline. And if they're savvy, they can get a corporate sponsor to cover the costs. There are clever ways to wrap brands around the video player or embed logos within the show's venue.
As the technology to implement a high-quality global live broadcast on the Internet gets cheaper and easier, we’ll no doubt see more examples of things like this. And these concerts are more than just a live feed. They're now interactive. Cool new widgets like Pomegranate's Twitter-Chat application displays viewers' tweets from across the globe during the concert under the YouTube channel's video player and allows you to add your own message to the conversation without leaving the show. This makes the event a shared group experience, mimicking some of the social aspects of being there in person.
Can we expect to see more big concerts on YouTube in the future? Would you like to Twitter with people while watching a live concert? Does it enhance the event for fans not physically at the venue?
