Banking on the belief that fans will jump at the chance of watching a concert at any time of the day or night, webcasting hubs like House of Blues Digital and the Digital Club Network are offering large numbers of free shows, with plans to expand their pay-per-view shows. But the webcasters are only beginning to figure out how to serve the 97 million American homes which have low-speed Net access.

Webcasters believe that their format will improve on television and cable concerts by allowing fans to choose camera vantage points, see backstage footage and explore additional music content. They also claim that their format is more flexible and offers more variety than televised concerts. Fans can watch webcast concerts whenever they want, not only when TV and cable networks schedule them. They get a choice of all kinds of music, not only the big-name artists that prime-time TV needs to keep ratings high. (And sometimes, even high-grossing live acts like U2 haven't delivered stellar ratings, which discourages broadcasters from putting on more shows).

Webcasters also say that their live and archived shows won't kill the live music industry, because ''nothing will take the place of the immersive shed [amphitheater] experience,'' said House of Blues Digital senior VP Chris Stephenson.

According to Stephenson, House of Blues Digital is ''going to wrap the consumer with other live music [besides the webcast concert]--anecdotes, digital downloads, video downloads, live touring news, on-the-road information. Everything about the live music world's going to be available here, and that's going to stimulate the live music industry, not stymie it."

More pay-per-view is coming
The expansion plans of the major concert webcasters are ambitious. House of Blues Digital has captured 4,000 shows from the four clubs it has wired, though only 200 shows--ranging from Cheap Trick to Ray Baretto with Kenny Burrell--are currently available in its archive. In six to eight months, HOB.com plans to offer a $7.99 pay-per-view live show in broadband format every night, Stephenson said.

The Digital Club Network has exclusive deals to stream shows from 40 clubs, such as Arlene's Kitchen in New York and the 9:30 club in Washington, D.C. Its schedule currently includes two to 12 live shows and 16 re-cast shows each day. The network will begin selling pay-per-views in the fall of this year; clubs will get part of the revenue in the form of a cash advance against future royalties, plus stock in the company, according to Digital Club's COO Ted Werth.

While Yahoo! Broadcast is currently webcasting concerts live from some twelve clubs in Dallas, its main consumer strategy is to aggregate other sites' concerts and musician interviews, said Michael Latham, Yahoo's senior director for production of entertainment and media. The site intends to build an archive of performances by well-known artists (such as Jimi Hendrix and Bush), but also archive up-and-coming club acts on its streaming servers.

Dealing with slow modems
Broadcasters might be fattening their concert archives, but the experience for viewers still isn't ideal. While the industry constantly touts the expansion of broadband access, the reality is that only 10% of Net users have it. The rest use analog phone lines, where sound quality is sketchy, and the video frame rate is slow. System crashes on users' computers, network congestion and time-consuming credit card transactions are other issues that the concert webcasters say they must deal with if the medium will see wider adoption.

HOB Digital is putting a lot of stock in the expansion of broadband. The site has had successful concerts with analog phone line users--60,000 on 56K modems for a Marilyn Manson concert--but the real market is in 300K speeds, contends Stephenson. He expects that by 2003, 50 million households will have broadband access, and America Online will fuel that expansion by signing up an unknown portion of its 21 million subscribers for its forthcoming high-speed "AOL Plus" service.

Yahoo's Latham said that it was impossible to predict the expansion of broadband, so Yahoo is committed to making webcasts available for users of all modem speeds. He stressed that the medium wasn't merely about sending the content out to users--CDs and cable can do that, he said--but broadcasters could offer a bigger "package" than just a performance.

Creative programming
"The model won't be as simple as the cable model," Latham stated. "We think it could go a little more inventive than that. We think it won't just be about offering access, but offering a package, an experience around it."

A "package" could mean that by purchasing a pay-per-view concert, fans might later get an advance CD of the show and could get access to other "interactive" features--band and venue information during the concert, online chat, and access to mailing lists and message boards so they can discuss upcoming shows.

When webcasts are available in a format more like television--a full screen with a high-quality stereo system, not a small frame on a computer monitor bleating tinny sound--the jump in quality may attract more users to broadband, webcast programmer hope.

The webcasters definitely seem to be ready. They are talking and thinking more like producers, trying to use their technology to create something unique. Digital Club Network, for example, has archived controllable, 360-degree still photos from its fifth Digital Club Festival. Pete Townshend offered a daily video diary in the days before his ''Lifehouse'' performances in London, which will be webcast as a pay-per-view later this year. Musicians can already jam with each other over the Net; someday, fans might be able to play a virtual show with their favorite band (who wouldn't have to hear it, of course).

"If you looked at all the tools on our network ... we could create just about any experience," Latham said. "We could give access to just about any commerce object that [consumers] could want. We could entertain them, whether it's in the realm of what's classically called 'gaming.' We could associate other media. It's really limitless what you can package around that experience."