We’ve been talking a little bit lately about OpenLIVE, the tool that allows musicians to easily and reliably record their live performances in high def to sell to their fans.
The exciting initiative gives bands the opportunity to affordably record their music in high definition with pretty much little to no effort. “This is completely new infrastructure for the Music Industry, and for the time being we’re letting bands and Artists sign up and use it for free,” says Simon Tait, Audio and Technology Director at OpenLIVE. “Capturing your recording is literally as simple as booking a plane ticket. We’ve engineered an automatic scheduling, recording, mixing, mastering and optimisation routine that produces very high quality recordings.”
Already some artists have already turned their OpenLIVE recordings into full albums, such as Papa G & The Starcats. Meanwhile, Dan Sultan is set to embark on a special OpenLIVE tour this month. To get to know a little more about the product and what it can do to help indie and unsigned artists we caught up with the OpenLIVE CEO Dale Moore.
What Is OPENLive?
“We’re a new music platform that provides an end-to-end recording solution allowing Artists, who have performed in venues equipped with our MasterBuilder hardware, to harvest mixed, mastered and ready to release recordings from their live show.
This is combined with a Hi-Res (CD quality and above) download store where these recordings can be purchased, along with a catalogue of music from major and minor labels, currently with over 2.5m tracks.”
How The Idea Came About
Simon Tate [co-founder]: “There were a few DIY live recording distribution services around but frankly the sound quality sucked. We set out to build an entire end-to-end system that didn’t involve the artist having to setup their own gear, and assured a high standard of quality control. We’ve also included detailed track editing, metadata tagging and copyright management functions so the right people get paid.”
How It Works
“We achieve this by the Artist simply establishing an account and scheduling the recording in the MasterBuilder-enabled venue(s) that they’re playing a gig in.
[include_post id=”435472”]We’ve spent the best part of 18 months building, testing, refining, breaking, testing and refining again to build infrastructure that gives artists this totally new tool to get their music out there, while requiring minimal input.
I won’t go into the detail simply as we don’t have time here! But basically the key steps are:
· Artist creates their own profile at www.openlive.co
· Once done, they schedule their own recordings in venues where MasterBuilder is installed, with a signal sent over the cloud to the relevant MasterBuilder that turns on and records as per the schedule sent by the Artist
· After the gig is complete, the Artist has a fully mixed, mastered and optimised recording in their secure dashboard for review
· Here, they can insert relevant tracks, delete anything they don’t have the rights to or didn’t like on the night, tick our online licensing agreement and push it live through OpenLIVE!”
Who Is It For?
“It’s for Artists – large and small. It’s a new avenue for them to get recordings out to their fans.”
The Benefits Of Using OpenLIVE
“There’s a bunch, but I’ll break it down to 3 key benefits:
· It’s additional revenue for Artists with virtually no extra work. They’re performing live anyway, and they have an audience (at the venue and online), so by using our platform there’s opportunity to get new music out to their audience.
· It’s saves going into a recording studio. Producing a full album may be a timely and costly exercise for bands/musicians. By having recordings of their live performances, they now have music from which they can build an audience, without having to go through the cost of producing a studio album. This music is also a great way to get great sounding demo material to labels (if that’s the path they want to go down) or venue to get better gigs
· There’s no upfront cost (for now) or risk. So you record, if you don’t like it, then you don’t have to do anything with it! You will always retain the copyright in the recording so it’s up to you if it ever gets heard by anyone but you. When we say no upfront cost for now, we expect at some point there will be some small cost associated with a release but until that time, we just want as many bands/musicians to take advantage of what we’re offering and hopefully make a little extra money from their live performances, while fans that couldn’t get to the gig hear some great new live music!”
Why It’s Important For Something Like OpenLIVE To Exist
“The Music Industry is in a state of flux. Streaming is clearly the way fans want to engage with music, but there’s many doubters out there about how this rewards the Artists (I should say there are many Artists that like streaming, so it’s not negative across the board, but there are clearly some concerns over this).
[include_post id=”463824″]Then there’s live music, which is highly engaging for fans, and for me is really the essence of music, and the way people have been engaging with music for hundreds (and dare I say thousands) of years. But there’s not a lot of discussion about live music. So I think what we’re doing is important as it is very much focused on the 2 most important parties when it comes to music – the musician and the fan.
For musicians, we provide an opportunity for much-needed new revenue streams to support them as a full-time musician, and for fans, well it’s giving them music that they have never had access to before. Hopefully we’ll help them discover great new musicians and encourage them to get to more live gigs.”
Plans For The Next 12 Months
“We want more of our hardware in more venues here and around the world to give more musicians the chance to get more of their music heard. It would also be a very satisfying thing for all of us at OpenLIVE if, through one of our live recordings, we help a musician ‘break through’. And with some of the live recordings I’ve listened to that we’ve done, there’s so much good music out there that people need to hear!”
OpenLIVE officially launched in August with their Hi-Res audio download store, however the key focus for the business has been live music and the OpenLIVE dashboard is just the latest step. If you’re interested in sussing it out, visit www.openlive.co.
