Jimmy Chamberlin set down his drum sticks to become CEO of a tech company that looks to build social experiences around live-streaming events

Smashing Pumpkins drummer Jimmy Chamberlin decided a few years ago that he was tired of the road. He wanted to be around his family more and watch his two young children grow up.



The next act for the big-league rock drummer? Investing in and advising tech companies.

“I was just kind of over being on the road and repeating the endless cycle,” Chamberlin said. “I’d been on the road for a good portion of his life, and I felt like as I got older that time was a commodity I was no longer prepared to mortgage.”



Chamberlin’s early tech efforts received a serious boost from a Chicago-based company founded by an entrepreneur who’d once interned at a studio where Chamberlin and Smashing Pumpkins lead singer Billy Corgan recorded.

The company was Groupon, whose founder, Andrew Mason, had once brought the band sandwiches. Watching Groupon’s ascent was part of the reason the Pumpkins’ drummer says he “caught the tech bug”.

His music industry experience took care of the rest. Chamberlin is the CEO of Chicago-based LiveOne, a company whose showpiece product is a service called CrowdSurfing that builds social, interactive experiences around live events.

After meeting the LiveOne team and a brief stint as an investor and adviser, Chamberlin came aboard as CEO about 15 months ago. The company has raised more than $4m since he joined, and grown from three employees to 25. The future is here for the music industry, he says, and they need to adapt.

“Today’s consumer is less interested in possessing things and more in experiencing them,” Chamberlin says. “That’s something the music industry needs to get its head around. Do we even need record companies any more? It’s going to be an interesting two to three years as we see this whole transition evolve. Music is always going to be only as sophisticated as the culture that consumes it,” he says.

“When I saw the CrowdSurfing application, it immediately took me back to scenarios with the Pumpkins,” Chamberlin said. “We looked at live streaming as another revenue source with the Pumpkins. Corgan and I used to talk about it, but we always whittled that reality down to the way people consume the content. Somebody looking at the event through a laptop with crappy speakers isn’t going to drive the economics. We needed to wait for live streaming to get better.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A screengrab of CrowdSurfing. Photograph: CrowdSurfing

CrowdSurfing’s reason for being also harkens back to its name. It gives fans a place to connect while watching the stream – and a place where advertisers can reach them. LiveOne works with companies like Red Bull and CBS, selling advertising that’s presented to music fans who chat with other fans during the CrowdSurfing live streams.

While the technology has arguably caught up, Chamberlin knows better than most that the music industry’s established business models haven’t caught up with the technological shift – and in some cases have been obliterated by it.

Music sales in the first six months of 2014 were a little less than $3.2bn, according to data from the Recording Industry Association of America. That’s down almost 5% from the same period last year, and streaming appears to be part of the reason why, based on the RIAA’s analysis of music consumption among consumers.

The figures are one more reminder of the fundamental shift in the music business. Lucrative CD sales gave way to less lucrative digital sales and now streaming companies like Spotify are chomping into digital download sales. The shift has been so monumental that no one blinks when a major act like U2 pre-empts a traditional album release by piping tunes straight into Apple users’ music libraries for free.

“The great irony of today’s more traditional music business is that it seems hell-bent on offering the most loyal fans ways to spend less, when what they actually want to do is to pay more for a better experience or product,” said PledgeMusic co-founder and CEO Benji Rogers, whose company helps musicians use technology to connect with fans.

Live streaming an experience like a concert, Chamberlin hopes, is something that could slake a fan’s appetite for content from a musician and keep them eager to open their wallet for more.

What Chamberlin is doing might sound contradictory, given that he’s a rock musician who once made his living making fans pay to see him live and now wants to offer today’s music fans the chance to do so, if they want, from their couch. But Chamberlin said streaming events can build an audience’s appetite for the real thing.

“There’s enough data around making things available or not, that the availability of content online is a good thing for the economics of the physical space,” Chamberlin said. “As CrowdSurfing evolves, it will never fully replicate the physical experience. But we’re looking at live streaming as a vivid business card for the experience.”

Live streaming may have caught on with fans but there are still questions about whether there’s a business model to build around it. Bob Lefsetz, a music industry analyst who publishes the Lefsetz Letter email newsletter and blog, said the business model isn’t there yet. “So far, no one’s made any money doing it,” he said.

Chamberlin is convinced the business is there and has big ambitions that may eventually take the company beyond music. LiveOne could look at something related to a political campaign and perhaps even mega-churches that want to stream a gathering to a live audience.

Chamberlin is betting that his company can capitalise on that, that it can get a growing number of people familiar with the act of streaming something that they might otherwise have only thought of as an event to experience in person. “I’m of the opinion that whatever the culture drives, that’s where you’ve got to run your business. It doesn’t pay to stamp your feet. Streaming is going to be a big part of the future,” he said.