Designing live concerts: U2 show how it's done

If you're a designer (or just into good design) and a music fan, I'd like to recommend the book U2 Show.  Despite the uninspired and nondescript title, this is a book about how the various U2 tours were designed -- from Boy all the way through Elevation.  The book explains the countless hours that go into stage design, lighting design, sound & speaker stack design, and a whole bunch of other areas (and it has some great photos too).  I really enjoyed the window this book provides into what goes into the design of a large rock concert, and it showed me again that basic principles of good design translate to all media forms.

Here are a couple of quotes from tour manager Willie Williams.  First, on how the PopMart tour came into being:

There was also a very direct (and very rare) brief to me that this tour would be ‘design-led’, rather than being intimidated by scale or logistics.  Having proved to themselves and to the world with ZooTV that, in terms of what can be toured, ‘anything is possible’, U2 were of a mind that the only limits to be placed on the creative ambitions of this tour were to be financial ones.

On the impossible design requirements given to the sound engineers:

Mark Fisher’s frustration with years of stage design constrained by traditional loudspeaker stacks led him to propose that we should keep the huge video screen free from clutter by placing the entire sound system in one central ball.  Most sound engineers would have resigned on the spot, but Joe O’Herlihy rose to the challenge of mixing a live show through what would essentially be a mono PA.

I like how they talk about the huge differences between the PopMart tour and the Elevation tour:

After the broad, churchy strokes of the Lovetown show and the sensory assault of Zoo TV and the garish, high-concept japery of PopMart, here are U2 playing their songs hard, straight and in your face.

It goes into detail on the simplicity of the Elevation stage and lighting design:

Video is not something that can simply be added to a show, a fact that is the downfall of many otherwise potentially interesting stage productions. We are so conditioned to look at television that moving camera pictures automatically become the focus of attention.

Because of this they went with what they call "Unmediated iMag", which means that the screens showing the band members will be static cameras, and showing everything in black-and-white to avoid distraction from what is happening on stage:

This proves once again what I have always believed to be the single most important purpose of visual design: to allow the content  to shine through elegantly, without distraction.  Pick up this book at Amazon if you're interested -- with more than just pretty pictures it brings a great design perspective to the enormous live concert industry.

Great reading on social networks and new media

My favorite blog right now is the wonderfully titled Alexander van Elsas’s Weblog on new media & technologies and their effect on social behavior.  I'm struggling to keep up with all the great things that Alex writes, so I wanted to give a quick summary of some my favorite posts here, as an introduction and to get my own head around it!

In Facebook will be no match for Google, he talks about Google's recent purchase of the social conversation site Jaiku, as well as Google's own social networking venture called Orkut.  Alex makes some really great points about why he thinks Google has a much better understanding of social networks than Facebook does:

Google doesn't have to build a social network as its primary strategy. Unlike Facebook, Orkut is simply another means to an end. Google is the connectivity on the web, and Orkut only is one aspect of that strategy. Think Gmail, think Google earth, thin iGoogle. All major Internet platforms than can easily be integrated into one compelling service for the user.

He closes with this excellent observation:

While Facebook is building walls around their service, trying to increase the value of their network (instead of value for its users), Google is becoming the major operating system on the Internet (Search, Social Networks, mail, RSS) and Mobile (Google Phone, Jaiku). Given this strategy I would put my cards on Google, not Facebook. No way they will be able to match that. The big question now becomes whether or not Google will be able to integrate all these services and still remain open as a platform thus providing more value to its users.

In The end of a defensive music industry era he examines Radiohead's decision to let fans decided what to pay for their music -- which I agree is a good idea, however from an earlier post I do wish they had a better site for this...

And finally, in 10 ways to improve web 2.0 and move into an era of true interaction, he continues a discussion that I got involved in last week as well, and makes some really great points about how to get to the next evolution of the web.

Check out Alex's blog and subscribe to his feed -- he's a smart guy and we can all learn from him!

Radiohead's great idea ruined by bad user experience

Radiohead is practically giving their new album away for free in an interesting experiment where they allow buyers to make up their own price for the album -- even if that price is zero.  I am very interested to see how this turns out and what the median price is going to be, but before they can sell any of the albums, they need to be able to get users through their site!

I was surprised to see UX Magazine's short but glowing review about the site Radiohead set up to allow users to buy the album.  They say that it "tells the story clearly but keeps a stylish edge."  I personally don't think it does either of these things.  Of all the screen shots I can show to prove my point, I'll settle on this psychedelic beauty:

I'm assuming the colors mirror the cover art, so let's forget about that for a minute.  The bigger problem is that it takes quite a bit of playing around to figure out what is going on here.  You can either order the "Discbox" at a fixed price, or make up your own price for the download option.  But the interface doesn't tell you this until you're right in the middle of it, and even then it's not very clear:

The basket simply has an open text box and a question mark which tells you "it's up to you" when you click on it (if you're wondering, clicking on the question mark on the second screen assures you, "No really, it's up to you").  Now, I'm all for quirky content, but this is just a little bizarre.  And I'm not just saying that because I've been on the site too long and the colors are giving me a headache -- the navigation is really quite strange and labyrinth-like.

Anyway, I think this is a great concept -- let's see what happens when we let music-lovers determine the value of the music they listen to.  My guess is that die-hard Radiohead fans will be willing to pay a lot more than the curious masses saying to themselves, "Can I really get this for free"?  But maybe that's the way it should be -- let the fans support you, and be confident that casual listeners will turn into die-hard fans once they listen to your stuff, and then they'll pay you next time.  If only they would get the user experience right...