YouTube is starting to really push into the live video streaming market, despite saying that it wasnt a viable market for a long time. The Google-owned video website has streamed the Outside Lands concert and an Obama press conference in recent months, but now it’s going to stream the Rose Bowl concert of one of the world’s most popular bands, U2.
The concert will begin at 8:30 PM PT on Sunday the 25th of October and it will be available in 16 countries. The live feed will be available on the U2 Official Channel, and feature a live Twitter feed of chatter about the concert.
The world’s largest video website, in a conference call earlier today, explained that it is seeking to experiment in live video. Clearly, YouTube sees some type of potential in this emerging market, as live video players Ustream, Justin.tv, and Livestream have started to prove the viability of this market.
So many bands are starting to become “stuck” (sorry, Lego joke) in the Lego trap, and so am i. To start off i had decided that everyone was just milking the Guitar Hero/Rockband goat as far as it would go. But for us its now gone full circle. When the Game first came out it was full of, who we considered, has-beens who hadn’t really released anything for a while, but some juicy bands are starting to sign up and now we find ourselves thinking, wouldn’t it be awesome if this band joined? Imagine a Lego Satriani slamming away!
The Initial line-up was Iggy Pop, The Automatic, Sum 41, Pink an other sickly pop groups like Kaiser Chiefs and you seem to get the impression that they made the game for the hell of it with whoever they could “stick” in (sorry) at the time, a bit like Guitar Hero 5 really. Or the U2 Rock band if they ever get there “I’m Jealous of Aerosmith” way about it. But as you dig deeper you start to get the impression that The Lego Rockband guys have more of a sense or humour than that. Other acts include Europe (Final Countdown), and Ray Parker Jr. (The Ghost Busters Theme dude) which both must have been added for comedy value, surely. Some acts actually have some integrity too like The Foo Fighters and Vampire weekend. I wonder if Bloc Party will Appear! (Aw come on, that was funny). Here is a Lego Blur.
Music Ally has reported that over 445,000 people illegally downloaded the new U2 album. All these downloaded were alleged to happen between the 18th of February till the 3rd of March from BitTorrent sites.
The chart supplied by the company shows the spike in downloads following the album’s leak in February, apparently due to it being accidentally made available for sale on an Australian digital music store ahead of its official release on 2nd March.
The debate is always would these people have purchased the album if it wasn’t leaked on BitTorrent clients? No one can really answer that question, but I’m sure that certain sales would have happened because of this.
Overall this does make me think that the claims of the Pirate Bay in the last couple weeks that “80 percent of all their torrents are legal”, cant be true.
Over at MusicAlly they have pointed out that the new U2 album (No Line On The Horizon) is currently on Amazon’s US Mp3 store for only $3.99. However, because we are based in the UK there is nowhere we can get this album for so cheap, until now. Tesco has taken the step forward and is now selling the new U2 album in a week-long deal for ony £3.97.
This shows that the digital music store price wars are about to heat up! However, you will notice that iTunes never seems to get into these price wars.