Concert Streaming Boom Fueled by APIs
Adam Brown, co-founder of Mux, on the future of video infrastructure
The burst of concert streaming startups showed that live music was turning into a two revenue stream business, one ticket for the room and one ticket for the stream. What changed was not just audience behavior, but the cost to launch. Video infrastructure had gotten cheap and easy enough that a new music company could stand up ticketing, playback, and analytics without building its own encoding and delivery stack from scratch.
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Mux described a wave of new live use cases during the pandemic, from weddings to kids sports, with concerts standing out because streaming adds obvious incremental revenue for sold out shows, distant fans, and premium access beyond the venue footprint.
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Wistia saw the same pattern from a different layer of the stack. More video startups appeared in roughly 18 months than in the prior decade because services like Mux let founders buy video infrastructure as an API, much like Stripe let startups buy payments instead of building it.
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The market quickly produced specialist concert platforms. Veeps hosted about 1,000 ticketed livestreams in 2020 and later worked with Live Nation to equip more than 60 venues for built in streaming. Other entrants like HowLive and eMusicLive launched in 2020 around the same hybrid concert workflow.
Going forward, live music infrastructure is likely to disappear into the venue and promoter stack. The winning products will not just stream the show, they will bundle ticketing, replay, chat, fan data, and upsells so every concert can keep earning after the doors close, and so streaming becomes a standard extension of the event rather than a special pandemic workaround.