Music Ally

Gig webcasts have a chequered history, to say the least. Squinting at a grainy postage-stamp sized video window trying to make out Madonna, in between swearing at buffering delays wasn’t many fans’ ideas of fun.

However, with technology having improved rapidly, there’s a new buzz around webcasts at the moment, thanks to the efforts of livestreaming companies like Ustream. Even YouTube is getting into the game with some high-profile gigcasts.

Ustream has been particularly busy, integrating its platform with Facebook to allow artists to both broadcast live and interact with their fans. Shakira debuted the video for her new music video Give It Up To Me using Ustream, and attracted 95,000 unique viewers during its initial ten-minute broadcast, and half a million more in the 24 hours after.

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Last Friday, the Foo Fighters webcast a gig from their own studio using the Livestream service. Figures released show that 440,000 total live streams were racked up on the night from more than 150,000 viewers – with a maximum of 20,000 at any one time.

People could watch the gig on the Livestream website, on Facebook or on their iPhones – with fans able to request songs via Facebook during the gig.

It’s not the 10 million streams achieved by U2’s YouTube gig last month, but not bad going. The interesting thing about this new wave of webcasts is the interactivity being wrapped around them, using Facebook or Twitter (and in some cases, both).

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