Live8 Rocks The World

The Live8 concerts have started this morning. Feeds are now coming in from London, Berlin & Rome. Paris, Philly & Toronto are scheduled to come in shortly. Millions in person, tuned in on-line, and watching.

The worldwide July 2nd Live 8 – The Long Walk to Justice concert will be held at eight locations and are being organized to put pressure on the G-8 nations' leaders to come up with more aid for Africa.

Lots of folks blogging coverage. Certainly beats the 1985 televised coverage with infuriating commercial cutaways. Technorati has continuous blog updates from around the world on the Live 8 concerts.

U2 & Paul McCartney

Live 8 London stage

Bono & Paul

Coldplay with Richard Ashcroft in London
Onstage now in London's Hyde Park are Coldplay with Richard Ashcroft doing "Bittersweet Symphony". Lots of crowd shots. Looks like a big crowd of hundreds of thousands.

Good Charlotte in Tokyo

Elton John in London

Audioslave in Berlin

Live 8 Berlin stage

Green Day in Berlin

Sarah McLachlan in Philadelphia

Maroon 5 covers Neil Young's "Rockin' in the Free World"

Dave Matthews Band in Philadelphia

Linkin Park & Jay-Z in Philly

Live 8 stage at Philadelphia Art Museum -
1 Million Attend according to Mayor

Roger & Pete - The Who in London
"Won't Get Fooled Again"

Pink Floyd & "Comfortably Numb" in London

From MSNBC.com:

"Concerts held more or less simultaneously in 10 venues are next to impossible for television to get its arms around.

And part of it was also MTV's failure to really try. There were as many commercial breaks as performances, and MTV's stable of correspondents spent more time talking about what a fantastic event it was instead of showing it.

With a click of the mouse, America Online visitors could jump from a video feed of the London concert to one from Philadelphia, Berlin or Rome. The performances were shown in their entirety. By mid-afternoon, AOL had set a record with 150,000 people simultaneously viewing video streams, the most ever, according to AOL programming chief Bill Wilson."

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The blogosphere exploded with rage over the inept MTV coverage of VJ's instead of music. Here's Jukebox Graduate's take on MTV's coverage: "It was childish, moronic, disrespectful, inappropriate, and just plain LAME."

And the bashing of MTV's Live 8 coverage continues in The Los Angeles Times by Robert Hilburn:

"Everyone knows MTV has long lost interest in pop music, so why doesn't the cable channel just admit it and leave the coverage of historic events, such as the humanitarian Live 8 concerts, to someone with respect for the music and its audience?

MTV's coverage of Saturday's event, designed to combat poverty in Africa, was beyond embarrassing. It was pitiful."

So. A day that combined a good cause and the best and worst that technology has to offer. In moments, the whole thing will be ripped and re-streamed as MP3's, bootlegs, bit-torrents and downloads. This blog sums it all up pretty well:

"Don't get me wrong, LIVE 8 was an amazing media feat. Yes, it may be an inflection point, from cable to the net, from MTV to remix your own. That, itself, is a victory for consumers. But isn't there a certain irony for celebrating a victory for more consumer choice and control for a handful -- around an event on global poverty? Is the highpoint of net-enabled media a mass entertainment event that draws us to SMS or click on a petition and feel we have done our part?

We love our technology and models of media, but we can't forget the cause (no matter how complex) and what we can do."

Neil Young Closes Live8 Concert in Canada

More on Live8 Finale: Neil Young Rocks the Free World.

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