Live, In A Movie Theatre

The joint project will broadcast music performances live to theaters in a bid to attract younger consumers who have mostly abandoned concerts because of the difficulty of securing tickets or the prohibitive distance to venues.

The new service is called Live Spot, which will erect large-scale screens and install high-quality audio equipment in movie theaters throughout Japan. Real-time performances of major concerts will then be piped to these theaters. The price of tickets is expected to be about half what they would be for the actual concert. The premiere performance will be by Japanese jazz singer Juju, whose concert at the Blue Note Tokyo club will be shown at 60 theaters nationwide.

KDDI has said that the domestic market for “other digital stuff” (ODS), in which content other than movies is shown in theaters designed for movies, has expanded to 5 billion yen ($50.3 million) in 2012 from 1 billion yen in 2010.