[By Staci D. Kramer] Caught up with Kevin Wall after his session near the end of Billboard Mecca conf at CTIA. It’s been more than 8 months since the success of Live 8 and almost that long since Network Live, a joint venture with AEG, AOL and XM went live with its first concert. What most people may not realize is Network Live was already in start-up mode when Wall took a leave of absence to produce Live 8. (Until then, he’d been out of the concert production business for ten years.) The deals with XM and AOL were “pretty much negotiated” before Live 8, says Wall.
“There’s no regularity to this yet. In a very short period of time we’re doing great numbers in traffic, which I can’t tell you. Revenue is way over what we projected. Expenses are less than I said. My headcount’s less than I thought it would be. I’ve got a global infrastructure — an office in London, an office in New York, this office in LA. We’ve produced about 35 shows in music. We’re now hopefully going to accelerate our plans on our launch of our next big vertical, which will not be music, it will be the next big thing around the theory of live and I think that’s probably going to be in the fall so we’ve accelerated that by six months. We are looking now to start to look at some strategic acquisitions to continue to drive this. We are here to build what is the new live pop-culture, multi-platform digital entertainment universe.”
AOL has the online exclusive for music but not necessarily for other verticals; Wall wouldn’t say if AOL has first refusal. One thing to keep in mind: Wall isn’t thinking only of long-form live events so, for instance, stand-up comedy snippets could work. “All the rules have changed,” says Wall. “We don’t think of half-hours, hours. รข
Subscriber content
?
Subscriber content comes from Gigaom Research, bridging the gap between breaking news and long-tail research. Visit any of our reports to learn more and subscribe.
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Comments have been disabled for this post