Control Room usually refers to a technical space, but in L.A. it’s a company that has become an online concert giant in short order and an unlikely environmental advocate, too.
The Beverly Hills-based entertainment company, owned by veteran concert and tour producer Kevin Wall, is among the nation’s biggest producer of live online concerts with 82 to date.
The production of online concert broadcasts is a growing segment of the entertainment world. The company has key partnerships with Microsoft Corp.’s MSN (and its 465 million online users) and DirecTV. On July 7 it will debut Al Gore and Kevin Wall’s worldwide Live Earth concert, which will spotlight environmental awareness, and is produced entirely by Control Room.
This past year, the company produced more than 60 online shows for MSN’s “Music in Concert,” including shows for Dave Matthews Band, Snoop Dogg, Maroon 5 and the Foo Fighters.
In order to “green” the Live Earth concert venues themselves, the company has a team dedicated to making sure the venues use power generated by wind, solar power or lightning; that they reduce waste, use recycled products and recycle items and include eco-friendly transportation whenever possible.
“Putting on the concert is a huge challenge logistically, but it’s very important that it be an actual awareness-raiser; the bigger challenge is getting people to pay attention to an issue,” said Nina Guralnick, Control Room’s general manager. She said the company won’t know the cost of the concert until all the receipts are in another 90 days from now.
“Would it be responsible to throw a big waste-producing concert?” asked Guralnick. “No, that’s why we have to make sure we do everything the right way.”
Control Room’s Internet broadcast of the Live 8 concert in 2005 reached an estimated 100 million people over the six weeks it was up online, and its quality was considered superior to broadcasts by competitors like MTV and VH1.
Last fall, Control Room signed the multiyear deal with MSN, Microsoft’s Web portal, which was looking to push streaming, live concerts to its users in order to get an edge on the likes of YouTube and MySpace.
MSN will exclusively air 36 different live events this year that will be available on MSN’s 42 sites around the world. The shows will also be available for on-demand viewing for an agreed period afterward.
The company, which now has about 50 employees, was known as Network Live when it produced the acclaimed Live 8 Webcast in partnership with Time Warner’s America Online under a now-expired one-year contract.
The company was initially a venture split between Anschutz Corp. unit AEG, XM Satellite Radio, America Online and Wall and shared the ad revenue when AOL and XM broadcast the concerts, but is now solely held by Wall. He bought back the other parties’ stakes for a reported $6 million-plus in 2006. The company is now management-owned and profitable, and has no plans to go public in the foreseeable future, Guralnick said.
The company is focused on next week’s concert, a huge undertaking with 100 broadcasters and 150 acts involved, including the Police, Smashing Pumpkins, Kanye West, Metallica and Madonna at seven far-flung locations: Giant’s Stadium in New Jersey, Wembley Stadium in London, Hamburg Arena in Hamburg, Aussie Stadium in Sydney, Makahurri Messe in Tokyo, Copacabana Beach in Rio and the Steps of the Oriental Tower in Shanghai.
“A lot of the artists really want to sit down and quiz us on how green we really are; it’s great,” Guralnick said. “Some artists have riders on their contracts that specify green energy be used for events and recycling at a venue.”
