This Livestreaming Startup Wants to Be the 'Netflix of Concerts'

The common narrative is that since online piracy and streaming sites started siphoning money from musicians' pockets, the only reliable revenue sources left are T-shirts and live performances. But that's assuming the everything-free-on-the-internet trend doesn't apply to real-world gigs—and of course it does.

There are a growing number of startups now livestreaming concerts online, the latest being "Living Indie," a fledgling company out of the London incubator Wayra that wants to be "a Netflix of concerts."

The glaring question is, can digitizing gigs help promote small, struggling bands, or wind up costing artists another revenue stream lost to cyberspace? The self-described music-fanatics at Living Indie naturally think it'll be the former, which is why they're working with "bands that are rising fast or already have devoted, cult followings," according to startup's website. "The indies, the lo-fis, the art-rocks, the indietronicas, the emos, the shoegazers."

Right now users can watch streaming shows for free, as well as the cut and archived clips of previous concerts stored in the site's archives—all from mid-sized venues and festivals in London and Spain, for now.

But eventually the plan is to start charging viewers a small fee per show, around two to eight bucks, Living Indie's founder Andres Sanchez told the Economist back in January. Half of that fee goes to the company, and half to the promoter or venue in exchange for permission to stream the concert on the internet.

Then the Living Indie staff rolls in with their equipment—HD cameras, audio equalizers, live video editing software, and broadcast from the venue to the web, and your smartphone or laptop. It broadcast its first live gig just over a week ago, and has now streamed five gigs total, Gizmag reported today.

However, the company insists it's "not just beaming concerts to your gizmos—we’re looking to create a whole new social experience in your living room or favourite pubs." To try and salvage some of the social aspect of going to a concert, they've included a chatroom feature where viewers can connect with other fans watching the show, and plan to build out this functionality more.

I've got to say, that's hardly going to make up for the difference between seeing a band live and watching them on your couch with headphones plugged into your iPad. That point's not lost on Living Indie, which is why they think the service can serve as a promotional tool, to get people excited about catching a musician's next live show, or even discover new artists on tour.

I've been listening to (and enjoying) a couple of the European indie band's on the site's library of past concerts and have already starred a couple to check out more later, so I can see the merit in this. And as the Economist pointed out, concert videos on YouTube have gotten millions of views, and they're often shot with a shaky smartphone camera from the crowd, not a team of professionals.

Living Indie's also not the first digital concert startup playing for this space: It joins similar services like Evntlive (acquired by Yahoo), IROCKE, Quello, Boiler Room, and Concert Window that are putting live performances on the web in one form or another. But none, yet, have become so popular as to do to live concerts what Netflix did to DVDs and Spotify did to recorded music.