live streaming goes mainstream at music festivals

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"AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Music festivals are booming, and so is one alternative to paying soaring ticket prices to spend a long weekend packed among 50,000 or more typically sweaty concertgoers: watching the performances online for free.

At the Austin City Limits Music Festival, about a third of the nearly 130 bands on a lineup that includes the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the Black Keys and Jack White will have their sets broadcast on YouTube. That's a record for the three-day festival that starts Friday. Just six years ago organizers began webcasting with a single feed and struggled to persuade artists to even participate.

The same was once true at trendsetters like Bonnaroo and Lollapalooza. But as Austin City Limits marks the unofficial end of the big-festival calendar in the U.S. for 2012, this year might also go down as the year when live-streams started crossing into mainstream.

Take the year's most talked-about performance: Tupac Shakur rising from the dead as a hologram at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in a resurrection that was live-streamed from the California desert and talked about around the world."