YouTube to stream Lollapalooza, Austin City Limits (AP)

NEW YORK – YouTube will live stream Lollapalooza and Austin City Limits in the video site's continuing push to bring music festivals to digital screens.

The Google Inc.-owned YouTube will announce Friday that it will present online coverage of the festivals, two of the summer's largest. YouTube has previously streamed festivals such as Tennessee's Bonnaroo, San Francisco's Outside Lands and, earlier this year, Southern California's Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival.

Lollapalooza and Austin City Limits, both produced by C3 Presents, will be presented with extensive live concert coverage from the various festival stages. Dell and Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. will sponsor the streaming.

Chicago's Lollapalooza takes place Aug. 5-7 and will be promoted with a "Lollapalooza Week" on YouTube. Exactly which acts will be streamed is yet to be announced, but this year's top performers include Eminem, Foo Fighters, Coldplay, Muse and My Morning Jacket. It's the 20th anniversary for the Perry Farrell-founded event, which began as a touring festival.

"For those of us who can't make it — we have YouTube," said Farrell in a statement. "Be a voyeur to this year's Lollapalooza. Watch as musicians offer their souls and the crowd devours them. You just may forget that you aren't really there."

Austin City Limits, which runs from Sept. 16-18 in the Texas capital, is celebrating its 10th anniversary. Its acts include Kanye West, Stevie Wonder, Arcade Fire, Coldplay and My Morning Jacket.

For YouTube, the deal represents growth toward an increasingly robust digital festival-going experience. Streaming festivals is appealing to the site because sponsors like having their names attached to the well-known events, and users typically stay longer than they might for three-minute videos. Viewing length can average nearly an hour.

"This allows us to showcase multiple artists each day, which is really exciting to users," says Dana Vetter, YouTube's music marketing programs manager. "And we can hope to expect longer viewing times from people who catch one set and trickle into the next one."

How many tune in will depend partly on which acts are streamed, but online audiences for festivals often number in the tens of millions and can even — over the full weekend — rival the audience YouTube attracts for live events like the royal wedding in April. About 72 million people watched YouTube's coverage of Prince William and Kate Middleton's wedding.

"In the past 12 to 18 months, we've come a really long way in terms of live music," said Vetter. "There's a huge audience connected with these things. The trajectory of live music has come a long way and we hope to see it continue."

There will be a primary live stream of performances as well as a secondary feed of the backstage areas and interviews. Interactivity with Facebook and Twitter will also be integrated. Videos will remain on YouTube for four weeks after the festivals.

In the last few years, mega-festivals have increasingly spread into the digital space where music fans unable to make the trek (or those who simply would rather avoid mud and heat) can follow along online. Vevo, the joint venture of Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and Abu Dhabi Media Co., streamed acts from this year's Bonnaroo. National Public Radio will webcast this year's Newport Folk Festival (July 30-31) and the Newport Jazz Festival (Aug. 6-7).

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Online:

http://www.youtube.com/lollapalooza

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iTunes to stream London fest on Apple devices (AP)

NEW YORK – Music fans can watch performances from the iTunes Festival in London without buying a ticket.

Apple announced Tuesday that performances from the festival will be streamed on Apple devices including the iPad.

The festival runs from July 1-31 at the Roundhouse in London, with acts ranging from Coldplay to Linkin Park.

Apple said it will stream performances in high definition on the iPad, the iPhone, the iPod touch and on iTunes via its free app for the festival.

Fans also can purchase live performances from artists on iTunes.

The iTunes festival is now in its fifth year.

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Online:

http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/ap/ap_en_mu/storytext/us_music_itunes_fest/41949647/SIG=10vmnkrh2/*http://www.itunesfestival.com

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Comedy Central to stream Bonnaroo comedy acts (AP)

NEW YORK – Comedy Central says it will stream comedy acts from the Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival next month.

The network announced Thursday that it will webcast a three-hour show June 12 featuring performances from Bonnaroo's Comedy Tent.

The 10-year-old festival held in Manchester, Tenn., centers on music but has long offered top comedy acts as counter-programming.

This year's performers include Lewis Black, Donald Glover, Eugene Mirman, Cheech Marin and John Waters. Jon Benjamin will host. His Comedy Central show "Jon Benjamin Has a Van" makes its debut in June.

The show will package the acts from the four-day festival. It will stream on ComedyCentral.com and be available on mobile and tablet devices.

Music acts from the festival will be streamed by Vevo.

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Online:

http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/ap/ap_en_mu/storytext/us_comedy_central_bonnaroo/41631021/SIG=1186fhho9/*http://www.comedycentral.com/bonnaroo/

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Google to stream music with new cloud services (Appolicious)

Google made some big announcements at its I/O conference in San Francisco today -- most notably, that it’s now gunning for iTunes.

The tech giant rolled out its Music Beta service, an iTunes-like bit of software that works from the Internet-based cloud rather than your computer’s hard drive. Much like Amazon’s music-streaming service, Google Music allows users to upload their songs to the cloud and then stream them anywhere, on computers or Android-based smartphones and tablets.

That will keep hard drives free while allowing users to set up playlists on any device and have it stream to the cloud, and they still get the option of specifying certain artists, albums, tracks or playlists that will be downloaded to their devices for offline play.

First Amazon, and now Google -- both huge companies are taking shots at Apple’s mobile and music supremacy, with not a lot going on over at the Apple camp. Dollars to donuts, that’s about to change.

We’ve been hearing that Apple is working on a cloud-based music service of its own, building a big server farm to accommodate the storage space and other considerations, but that it was hung up on licensing considerations. With Google clearing that hurdle, I’d wager that Apple can’t be far behind, especially because the company’s media business has been a huge part of its success during the last decade. The popularity of the iPod and the ease of use of iTunes led to the iPhone and then the iPad -- and Apple isn’t looking to hand off that torch to anybody, least of all Google, anytime soon.

So it seems like a fair bet to assume Apple will be announcing, in some capacity, its own streaming digital locker service for music (and other media, perhaps) when its Worldwide Developers Conference rolls around in early June. Apple’s preview graphic on its website says the event will preview the “future of iOS and Mac OS X,” and that will likely concern a lot of how media works with Apple’s powerhouse devices, seeing as a new iPhone and iOS rollout isn’t expected until September.

Google’s new services are a pretty good indicator of the things Apple will be setting as its baseline with its cloud service. Streaming to iOS devices is a given, and the combination online-offline setups seems like a solid choice as well. But Apple will definitely be coming to the party looking for ways to one-up the competition, because that’s really what it is best at doing. And all this competition suggests some very cool services and features coming to the mobile market.

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