Live Gig Footage To Your Phone

As video technology has gotten cheaper and smaller, it's been a dream of many artists and fans alike to shoot every gig at a venue. While this sometimes happens with the venue using pro equipment, it actually happens anyway with many in the audience holding their phones up to capture the performance.

That's all well and good except it's a pain to hold your arms up for more than 5 minutes at a time, and the act doesn't make anything from the process (except for some additional promotion). Now a beta version of the Soundhalo app may take care of both situations at once.

Soundhalo takes the footage and audio from a production crew at the venue and delivers a fully mastered MP4 video straight to the cloud directly after the song. Fans can then pay to download the song directly to their Android phones one song at a time.

There's a lot of  upside here. First of all, the production quality (especially the audio) is better than what can be captured by a phone, the fan can get it immediately so it can be an impulse buy, and the band has an additional income stream.

If venues were smart about it, they'd build this feature into the price of each ticket, but I can see why that probably won't happen. One of the biggest problems of digital commerce is clearances, and live recording can be a hornets nest just waiting to be struck. What if the artist decides to play a song on the spur of the moment that's not under his or her control? There's not time for clearances if the song is available immediately after it's performed. The artist/publisher/Soundhalo also has to pre-clear everything before the gig, and anyone who's ever tried to do that knows that it always takes more time than it should.

S till, for a hungry up and coming band that owns that owns their own publishing gigging in a club, it's a great way to increase revenue (if only slightly) and capture a memory at the same time.

On a similar note, an app called Switchcam allows aggregation of phone camera videos. If your fans are going to record you, you might as well have access to it.

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