The Coachella festival always signals the start of Spring proper for me, I of course look forward to hearing some of my favourite bands play live, as well as seeing what advances YouTube / Google make in their coverage.

As far as the YouTube interface goes, I preferred last year’s version - with the Social Media shout-outs appearing to the right of the main video. I also felt the who’s playing and who’s on next was better done last year too. As per last year - shout-outs were evenly split between Twitter and Facebook, with Google+ messages barely 1 in 50.

What really stood out this year though was the ’Rebroadcast’ service YouTube provided - where they looped the live footage 2-3 times after each night. This is how I watched most of the acts - and it enabled me to dive right in and see who I wanted to see and skip those who did not spark my interest.

YouTube / Google are still fairly poor at the Video highlights / edit thing and the so-called ’Highlight Reels’ are attrocious. The BBC is far better at the editing thing - and providing full and set highlights per artist.

Obvious trend this year was the dominance of what the American’s like to call ’EDM’. In terms of legendary performances though, there were very few of these - Major Lazer put on a spirited show, but it’s really only dance music acts like Basement Jaxx and Groove Armada who know how to put on a proper show for this genre of music. However good James Blake’s music is, I’m not sure how well it works in a lively festival setting - I tend to agree with Glastonbury die-hards in that you need a proper spirited ’band’ mechanic for a live performance to really work - and on that basis, the standout highlight for me was Janelle Monáe. Of Monsters and Men, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Grimes, Bat for Lashes, La Roux, Metric and Poliça were pretty good too...

I caught whole or partial sets by the following artists:

• Baauer
• Bassnectar
• Bat for Lashes
• Beardyman
• Benny Benassi
• Blur
• Disclosure
• Franz Ferdinand
• Grimes
• Infected Mushroom
• James Blake
• Janelle Monáe
• Jessie Ware
• La Roux
• Major Lazer
• Metric
• Moby
• New Order
• Of Monsters and Men
• OMD
• Poliça
• Purity Ring
• Yeah Yeah Yeahs
• The XX

I’m an avid follower of the world’s leading music festivals - specifically how they are broadcast and ’packaged’ for the digital audience. I’ve kept tabs on the BBC’s and YouTube’s coverage of music festivals over the last few years, and reported back on how each has evolved their offering - benchmark events have been Glastonbury in the UK and Coachella in the US. In this Olympic year, there is no Glastonbury, so we will use BBC 1’s Big Weekend extravaganza - the 2012 Hackney Weekend Music Festival as the UK benchmark.

Where the BBC always excels is in the depth and breadth of its broadcast coverage, and in its archiving. For this year’s Coachella there was really just a smattering of play-back videos from the 3 days of live music, and no full sets. The BBC though has video highlights for pretty much every featured artist, including full sets for the festival headliners.

Watching live though was a different story, as YouTube’s Coachella coverage had better broadcast quality and a much superior interface - with full interaction! For Coachella, fans were able to connect via Facebook, Google+ and Twitter and do comments and shout-outs during the performances - on a live update feed - obviously comments are enabled for most content on YouTube. YouTube also cleverly includes the hashtag #coachellalive on all the updates posted - for maximum exposure. Moreover YouTube’s Coachella screen had a really clever rolling ’What’s On’ panel with dynamic thumbnails - which allowed you to mouse-over for live previews of each stage!

The BBC interface did not really makes the most of social media, and it was noway near as easy to organise your viewing schedule. I also noted that for last year’s Carlisle Big Weekend, the BBC was much better at posting up setlists on the artist overviews. Currently the write-ups are mostly sans setlists, which is something we kind of expected after last year!

It’s a tale of two very different approaches - as for live and direct coverage, YouTube’s system was most obviously superior, but in terms of being able to really ’catch’ the music - in terms of ’on demand access’ - then the BBC comes up trumps, as you can view after the fact - most of what you missed, which was not the case for

Last year I blogged about catching the year’s first big music festival courtesy of YouTube - who broadcast live form the 5 stages over the 3 days. I raved about the really clever interface - how they included hashtags into their live updates - and how slickly the whole thing worked, including the uninterrupted streaming broadcast itself.

This year the layout of the interface was even better - with the current and upcoming bands listed in the centre, and the updates off to the right. It was interesting to see the addition of the ’Login with Google+’ option - although I never saw a Google+ originated post - they were about 70% Twitter Updates, with 30% Facebook - I even logged on myself to post updates during the Azealia Banks and Miike Snow sets.

I did not really start watching properly until the Saturday - and thus caught a mix of highlights and full live gigs by the following artists:

• AWOLNation
• Azealia Banks
• The Big Pink
• Buzzcocks
• Childish Gambino
• Datsik
• Dr Dre & Snoop Dogg + Eminem, Fiddy, Warren G, Wiz Khalifa et al.
• Florence & The Machine
• Kaiser Chiefs
• Kasabian
• Miike Snow
• Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds
• Radiohead
• Santigold
• SBTRKT
• Swedish House Mafia

I would have loved to have seen, but missed these:

• Amon Tobin
• araabMUZIK
• Borgore
• Dada Life
• DJ Shadow
• Feed Me
• Flying Lotus
• Frank Ocean
• Girl Talk
• Justice
• Kaskade
• M83
• Noisia
• SebastiAn
• The Weeknd

I always compare YouTube’s coverage of this with the BBC’s coverage of its main music festivals. I think the actual live streaming and the social experience is better by YouTube, but overall the BBC still leads - as they provide so much better supporting materials - and actually post up much more of the video highlights - only 76 Videos are listed on YouTube’s Coachella Page - and these are individual tracks, whilst for the BBC there is normally an extended highlights (circa 30 mins.) plus a couple of individual great moments from nearly all the featured performers - a number of the videos on Coachella Live are not even the best moments from those sets.

On my somewhat dodgy Talk Talk connection, I was astounded to get a totally seamless experience over the whole event - did not drop out once - and switching between the 3 live feed options was butter smooth!

As I’ve said before, I&

Once again I enjoyed the festival courtesy of the BBC, in my home lounge - and entirely via the Internet. I still feel like I would want to check it out ’on location’ one of these years - as long as I had guarantees of good weather, and could attend ’Kate Moss’ style - i.e. being flown to and from luxury 5 star hotel at the start and end of every day.

Following my minor critique of the Big Weekend website, BBC are making ever more concessions towards the social Internet, and although those social elements still aren’t quite as slick as YouTube’s Coachella coverage, they’re not too far away now, and the BBC Video archives offer so much more!

With my newly acquired iPad, it was interesting to see that the only coverage available for the iPad was via the BBC’s excellent iPlayer App. The main BBC Glastonbury website is still largely flash, and the Mobile site is not really up to par with the latest advances in technology. The tipping point will be when the main Glastonbury site is done in HTML5.

Anyway, as for the 3 day festival - I quite enjoyed Friday Night headliners U2, although there were no real surprises here, same goes for Saturday’s Coldplay who featured some great new material, but did not surprise really either. Sunday’s headliner Beyoncé was magnificent though and in fine voice and full fitness dance prowess. Her set opened with a bang, and those who thought she might have front-loaded it with ’Crazy In Love’, ’Single Ladies’ and ’Nasty Girl’, were in for a surprise as her set continued to deliver the goods throughout. She included all of the Destiny’s Child hits, as well as excellent cover versions of Prince’s ’The Beautiful Ones’, Alanis Morisette’s ’You Oughta Know’, Kings of Leon’s ’Sex on Fire’ amd Etta James’s ’At Last’ there were also some lovely little mashup touches including a segment of Mark the 45 King and The Eurythmics’ ’Sweet Dreams’. Shame on all the detractors who tried to belittle Beyoncé’s performance. Beyoncé and her all-female all-in-white band performed magnificently throughout.

Another magnificent female performance came courtesty of Janelle Monáe, who had little communication with the crowd, but managed a

As I often do, I caught the odd snippet of live coverage of the first of the big summer festivals - BBC Radio 1’s Big Weekend, this time from Carlisle. I made sure I ’tuned-in’ online for the main headline act - Gaga, and I was not disappointed as she played most of her hits, plus a smattering of new material, some jazzy numbers, a couple of ballads and a latin track - Lady Gaga entered in heavily pregnant guise inside a gold coffin, nice touches included dedication of ’Orange Colored Sky’ to Will and Kate; highlight was current personal favourite Gaga track ’Judas’ right at the end.

Other highlights included a commanding performance by Tinie Tempah and a masterclass in proper dance music programming and sequencing from those 3 funky Swedes - Axwell, Sebastian and Steve (SHM) whose clever edits and mashups were included in the following tracks:

01. Swedish House Mafia vs. Tinie Tempah - Miami 2 Ibiza (Swedish House Mafia Intro Edit)
02. Ting Tings - Hands (Edit)
03. Style of Eye - We Are Boys
04. Arty - Around The World
05. Swedish House Mafia - One w/ Rune RK - Calabria
06. 2000 And One - Spanish Fly (Butch Remix) w/ Calvin Harris - Flashback w/ Calvin Harris - Awooga
07. Axwell vs. R.E.M - Heart Is My Religeon (Blake Jarell Mash-Up)
08. Pendulum - The Island (AN21, Max Vangeli & Steve Angello Remix)
09. Steve Angello pres. Who’s Who - Yeah
10. Hard Rock Sofa & St. Brothers - Blow Up (Thomas Gold vs. Axwell Remix) w/ Adele - Rolling In The Deep (Acapella)
11. Axwell - Nothing But Love (Remode)
12. Depeche Mode - Personal Jesus (Eric Prydz Remix)
13. Steve Angello & Alex Metric - Open Your Eyes (Tim Mason Festival Dub) w/ Depeche Mode - Personal Jesus (Acapella)
14. Alesso - Dynamite w/ Daft Punk - Around The World (Acapella) w/ Sebastian Ingrosso - Kidsos
15. Swedish House Mafia feat. John Martin - Save The World [John Martin Live]

This really was one of the best club sets I have heard in a long time, quite brilliant from start to finish.

As far at the live coverage goes, BBC are still best with providing in-depth content, in and around the live performances with off-stage antics, interviews and accoustic performances all featured - as well as archived videos from most of the artists featured.

YouTube’s coverage of Coachella, had a couple of great innvovations which would have been nice to have seen on the BBC

I always thought the BBC were the masters of live music coverage, and in many ways they still are - in terms of all the behind the scenes footage, biographies, interviews, escapades and impromptu live accoustic sets. For this year though, YouTube has done a sterling job in letting non-attendees witness the live spectacle of Coachella , America’s Glastonbury of sorts, at least a little brother to Glastonbury in most ways.

I’m not going to split hairs on the lineup, I have watched a number of bands now, and I’m really impressed with the simplicity and elegance of the YouTube Coachella Festival interface, and the cleverness of the Twitter and Facebook connects. For Twitter , YouTube are automatically embedding the "#CoachellaLive’ hash tag for superb Twitter trending performance. Via integration with Twitter and Facebook they allow Fans to easily post ’Shout Outs’, at the same time promoting the festival and YouTube itself.

The interface has a simple Programme Guide and What’s on Now / Coming Up listing - everything you really need for live music coverage. BBC goes a little further with Artist Biographies, Videos and backgrounds - linking into the enormous archives that make up the complete BBC experience. I don’t expect YouTube do to this, but it would be nice to have some king of tag-indexed library of officially related videos for each of the featured artists, and a means to access the elements of the live stream individually post gig also.

I can really see YouTube becoming a forerunner in this, and can foresee a two-stream concert ticketing system where a lower priced tariff allows you to experience the concert from the comfort of your home sofa - allowing to to neatly forego the pleasures of stinky chemical toilets, endless queues and the potential of rain and mud.

With the rapid development of Internet Television services - connecting with a variety of home streaming devices - Apple TV , Google TV etc. I see this as a big potential money earner for YouTube . Mainstream cinemas are already on the bandwagon - providing streamed access to live events - operas, pop concerts and sporting events - giving global access, as well as more convenient access in some ways - to a much larger audience. This is certainly an object lesson in how to do things well. The sound and video - were great for the whole of my viewi... More