The iTunes music festival is currently underway, providing 30 nights of free music in London and streaming live online for everyone else around the world. The festival will be streamed live via iTunes on your computer,  mobile apps for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad as well as through the Apple TV. 

This is not the first iTunes Festival nor will it be the last, but is anyone especially the acts paying attention to the trend and how popular this festival has become over the years? The festivals popularity has continued to grow and will be streamed to over 80 different countries this year. The main revenue stream here is to push fans to buy albums and songs from the artists performing at the festival, especially live recordings of the songs they perform and festival highlight compilation albums released later.

I believe there is more to this that artists should pay attention to with regards to the audience. 

The potential to generate revenue from allowing people to pay to stream their concerts live via iTunes or any other platform. As people have more connected devices, especially internet capable TVs these days, there is the potential to generate revenue using a streaming model. Provide people with a platform to pay to watch the same concert they couldn’t get tickets to. Make it the same price as the concert ticket so those that want to go and experience that ‘atmosphere’ can still go. Those who cannot just log on to their concert app, pay to view and watch a live stream of the concert at home, following along as the artist does a new version of that song they love so much. A special live version while rocking the baby to sleep.

Image how much more revenue the artist could generate from that. Yes people will find ways to game the system but it will still be a larger revenue stream than was previously possible by reaching the audience at home. 

What about those countries the artist cannot go to? Stream to those countries where your fans will pay to watch you.

This is the concert platform of the future... especially as we move towards 3D televisions and projections. Apple is already ahead of the competition in this regard and I wont be surprised to see the possible innovations they put into the Apple television if they ever release one. For now, just building a model for artists to generate more revenue could be another avenue of profit for the company. 

Now that would be interesting...