Steve Martin, legendary comedian and banjo player extraordinaire, has been quoted widely for his career advice turned adage, “Be so good they can’t ignore you.”
Allen Sanford and Karl Rogers are doing just that.
The South Bay entrepreneurs are the brains behind IROCKE, a web platform that organizes live streaming concerts from venues all over the world. Their latest venture, Forever Festival, is IROCKE’s seven-day, 24 hours-per-day music fest, which begins August 4 and has been dubbed the “Earth’s first live digital music festival.” The festival includes musical heavyweights Bob Weir, Kings of Leon and Mos Def and broadcasts live at irocke.com from more than ten countries.
Sanford and Rogers have garnered the ultimate nod of musical approval: an endorsement by Rolling Stone magazine, which this week highlighted the Forever Festival.
Watching concerts online has become fairly commonplace in the last year two years, with festivals like Coachella and Lollapalooza offering global web audiences a front row seat at their shows. But live streaming concerts was far from standard practice when Sanford starting doing it at his Saint Rocke club in Hermosa Beach in 2008. In fact, he was the first club owner to stream nightly.
Rogers has a history of pioneering internet consumer products. He founded Universal Interactive Services, the first major studio Internet division, as well as Time Warner’s Roadrunner service, currently the second largest broadband Internet service in the world. Rogers and Sanford joined forces in 2010. The keen-eyed businessman encouraged Sanford to think of live streaming possibilities beyond Saint Rocke. Thus IROCKE was born.
The innovative platform was born out of a very simple goal: organize all of the available webcasted concerts in one place, make them easy to find and easy to access.
Forever Festival is a natural extension of IROCKE and a natural result of the expanding digital musical world. Live-streaming concerts have become so popular that IROCKE is able to curate 175 hours straight of digital musical performance across the globe.
“In only two years, IROCKE has seen an early niche industry gain traction around the world,” Sanford said.
IROCKE is a passion project for both Sanford and Rogers, and one born from a desire to use technology to amplify, not erode, the wonder that is live music.
“In the same way the 1960’s communal spirit revived the music festival format,” Rogers said, “modern-day live digital concert visionaries are re-imagining what is possible with live music performance, and are changing live music, forever.”
Forever Festival is IROCKE’s first major foray into the spotlight, but its founders are certain that this is just the beginning.
“In some ways, being ‘two guys from the beach’ has made it more difficult to fully convey our global, long-term vision for IROCKE,” Rogers said. “But we recently crossed the one million page view mark, and some huge names in digital media have validated our platform including Mark Cuban, Bob Weir, Roger McNamee, Rolling Stone, and CBS.”
“We believe [the live-streaming industry] will be a bigger global market than the $26 billion live physical concert industry by 2016,” Sanford said. “Digital evolution is inevitable, and we see live digital concerts as the next logical progression in that evolution.”
Weir, the legendary Grateful Dead founding member and 1994 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee, has also been a live streaming pioneer, founding TRI Studios in Marin County for the purpose of creating state-of-the-art live streamed shows. He has fully embraced both IROCKE and the Forever Festival.
“So, we’re looking at some Big Fun here with Forever Festival: live music from around the world, much of it going down at the same time, like the regular festival, without the mud,” Weir said. “If you’re not into what’s in front of you, you go to another stage, only you let your fingers do the walking and you stay on the couch, or on the bed, or whatever…”
Forever Festival starts Sunday, August 7 at 5:00pm PDT (from the Hermosa Beach Summer Concert Series, another of Sanford’s projects; see below) and runs through Sunday, August 11 at 11:59pm PDT at 4evrfest.com.
