BBC's Hackney Weekend Coverage is Peerless, could do a lot more with Social Media though

I’m an avid follower of the world’s leading music festivals - specifically how they are broadcast and ’packaged’ for the digital audience. I’ve kept tabs on the BBC’s and YouTube’s coverage of music festivals over the last few years, and reported back on how each has evolved their offering - benchmark events have been Glastonbury in the UK and Coachella in the US. In this Olympic year, there is no Glastonbury, so we will use BBC 1’s Big Weekend extravaganza - the 2012 Hackney Weekend Music Festival as the UK benchmark.

Where the BBC always excels is in the depth and breadth of its broadcast coverage, and in its archiving. For this year’s Coachella there was really just a smattering of play-back videos from the 3 days of live music, and no full sets. The BBC though has video highlights for pretty much every featured artist, including full sets for the festival headliners.

Watching live though was a different story, as YouTube’s Coachella coverage had better broadcast quality and a much superior interface - with full interaction! For Coachella, fans were able to connect via Facebook, Google+ and Twitter and do comments and shout-outs during the performances - on a live update feed - obviously comments are enabled for most content on YouTube. YouTube also cleverly includes the hashtag #coachellalive on all the updates posted - for maximum exposure. Moreover YouTube’s Coachella screen had a really clever rolling ’What’s On’ panel with dynamic thumbnails - which allowed you to mouse-over for live previews of each stage!

The BBC interface did not really makes the most of social media, and it was noway near as easy to organise your viewing schedule. I also noted that for last year’s Carlisle Big Weekend, the BBC was much better at posting up setlists on the artist overviews. Currently the write-ups are mostly sans setlists, which is something we kind of expected after last year!

It’s a tale of two very different approaches - as for live and direct coverage, YouTube’s system was most obviously superior, but in terms of being able to really ’catch’ the music - in terms of ’on demand access’ - then the BBC comes up trumps, as you can view after the fact - most of what you missed, which was not the case for YouTube, even though a lot of the material was re-broadcast, it was just not available for on-demand viewing.

In some ways I think the BBC has dropped the ball a little - technologically speaking, even though the perfect Music Festival solution is a combination of both approaches. For live music, a live updates feed really adds to the feel of the event and allows ’armchair viewers’ to participate in their own way!

Thanks to the BBC I caught full sets by the following artists, most of which I enjoyed enormously:

• Andy C
• Annie Mac
• Azealia Banks
• Calvin Harris
• Deadmau5
• Delilah
• DJ Fresh
• Eric Prydz
• Florence + The Machine
• Jay-Z
• Jessie J
• Jessie Ware
• Kasabian
• Lana Del Rey
• Madeon
• Nas
• Nicki Minaj
• Rihanna
• Rita Ora
• Santigold
• Swedish House Mafia
• Tinie Tempah
• Will.i.am

Yep - mostly Dance and Hip Hop - that’s what I was in the mood for on this occasion, tried to listen to some rock, but somehow quickly lost interest - sorry Jack White - normally a fan... Actually Kasabian were pretty cool - I will make an exception for them!