Tonight, fans from around the world enjoyed a down-home live concert featuring the Honky Tonk Tailgate Party Tour. This quartet of country talents put on an amazing show for fans everywhere. And when I say everywhere, that includes good-ol’ folk from as far away as Slovakia! Yes, two country western fans from Slovakia enjoyed the global stage that DeepRockDrive hosts for artists to interact with their fans anywhere and everywhere.
While the guitars and fiddles were streaming music around the globe, the interactivity from fans was coming into the studio via the Internet. At one point a fan from Roswell, Georgia shouted out at the band that it, “Feels like I am sitting right in the front row.” For the team here at DeepRockDrive, that’s music to our ears because our tagline is “A million front row seats.” That’s our aspiration as we build out our service and bring in more of your favorite artists for interactive shows.
We use that term “interactive” a lot when we talk about the feeling of being in a front row seat. I thought I’d take a few minutes to show exactly what it means for both fans and artists during DeepRockDrive live online concerts.
Let’s start by forgetting about webcasts and poor-quality audio and video. They’re passive and boring and look awful. It’s 2008, and it’s high time that we use the Internet to really engage during concerts. We’ve built tools that let you and the artists engage during concerts.
First, we give you the choice of how you experience the show. During every concert, we stream both high-bandwidth and low-bandwidth version of the show so that you get the maximum possible quality over your Internet connection. We go beyond that by giving you more than one angle from which to watch the show…
You can watch a professionally directed live mix like you’d see on TV, or you can switch to get close-ups of the artists. We change these angles for every show to get the best effects for the type of artist performing (we welcome all genres at DeepRockDrive). Click to switch as often as you like. You’re in control.
We’ve all dreamed of collaborating with the artists the we enjoy. One way that DeepRockDrive helps fans and artists work together is through set-list voting. Every artist that performs at DeepRockDrive brings in a list of songs that they’re comfortable playing. But the magic happens because they agree to let the audience vote on which song is played next!
As the show happens, fans vote and the DeepRockDrive service keeps a live count of the vote leaders on giant screens in the studio. As a song ends, the artist looks to the readerboards to see what the audience wants to hear next. It’s especially cool when a dialog opens up and the artist pushes the fans toward a type of song. Sometimes the fans agree, but sometimes they push the show in their own direction. Every show is fun because it’s unpredictable.
Anyone who has been to a live music performance has something to say to the artist. Sometimes you scream it at the stage, other times you whisper it to a friend. At DeepRockDrive, when you have an opinion about the show, you “shout it out…”
Shouting out your thoughts not only echoes out to the community, as shown above. Your shouts are also blasted onto over 40 bigscreen monitors that wrap the stage. The artists see what you shout just milliseconds after you send it to them. And they react!
Our emotions tend to take control of us, and at DeepRockDrive we encourage emotional outbursts. In fact, we’ve created a technology called “EmotApplause” that lets fans click an icon reflective of the emotion they’re feeling and beam it into the studio during the show:
Whether you want to clap, smooch the screen with a kiss, ROCK ON!, or throw your bra at the lead singer… EmotApplause gives you the tools to do it. Every show has different emotions appropriate for the music, and when you click an icon, DeepRockDrive totals your incoming emotions with the rest of the world’s and displays enormous animations on the in-studio screens. So if you and your friends work together to blast a lot of ROCK ON!s to the studio at the same time, the waiving horns will be the biggest of all emotion animations blazing in the studio for the artist.
All of these tools work together simply and seamlessly to make a concert at DeepRockDrive like none you have ever been to before. When you really engage with the artist and the other fans from around the world, you don’t just watch… you participate.
Interactivity is what makes DeepRockDrive’s online concerts truly unique, and why everyone gets to experience the show from a virtual front row seat. We hope to see you at a DeepRockDrive show soon. No matter what your taste in music, you’re bound to find a show you’ll enjoy on our upcoming concert calendar.
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Once you enter your Facebook username and password, your accounts are linked! Anytime you want to invite your Facebook friends to a show, you’ll have the convenience of the Facebook friends interface. Just click the friends you want to join you at the show, and press the Send button… 
Your friends will get the invitation on Facebook and have an opportunity to join you at the show. We’ve enjoyed creating an entirely new interactive live concert experience togther with you over the past months. The first 65 shows at DeepRockDrive have been exciting for artists, fans, and us here at DeepRockDrive alike. Now it’s time to blow the doors off this joint with bigger shows, with committed artists, and instant access to invite your friends, for free, in support of the artists you love. We hope you enjoy the new site and Facebook app, and we’ll see you at the shows!