The Music Tv Revolution ; the Death of Pop On the Box has Spurred a Band of Enterprising Producers to Fill the Void with Exhilarating Made-for-the-Net Live Shows

Evening Standard - London › July 10, 2009

Linked as:

Summary

THE BBC splurged on Glastonbury coverage again this year, enabling stay-at-home music fans to see more bands from their sofa than they would if they'd spent hours trudging between Somerset fields. This was the first year when TV schedules didn't matter, however, with BBC's on-demand iPlayer web service for the first time allowing instant access to the music people wanted, when they wanted it.

The internet has been necessarily the music lovers' port of call in recent years -- as a glance at the barren listings for the mainstream TV channels reveal almost no other options. Channel 4 might show you some brief live footage if you're still up after midnight on a work night, Jools Holland is off the air until September and gone for ever are Popworld, CD:UK and Top of the Pops. The biggest thing on MTV's main channel right now is a reality show about Kerry Katona. It's no wonder record companies were so frustrated when Jonathan Ross's Friday night chat show was suspended last year -- where else can they show off their bands to such sizeable audiences? The web has the statistics to claim equally impressive viewerships, but the fact that people are all clicking in their own time, rather than making an appointment to watch together in the living room, still makes popular footage feel less significant. It's unlikely that people will look back on the day Susan Boyle's performance on Britain's Got Talent swept YouTube with the same sense of life being altered that they had when seeing The Smiths on TOTP or Nirvana on The Word.

See the full content of this document

Extract

The Music Tv Revolution ; the Death of Pop On the Box has Spurred a Band of Enterprising Producers to Fill the Void with Exhilarating Made-for-the-Net Live Shows

Nevertheless, a few innovators believe that proper, web-only TV shows rather than mobile-phone footage are the future of ent...

See the full content of this document