Live Earth - a Success or Flop?

I know that few people ever gave a rat's back end about this subject to begin with, and of those few, only a small percentage even care about any follow-up. But in case you are one of those people...

"Live Earth" was dead weight for NBC this weekend.

The three-hour prime-time telecast of the event, designed to raise awareness of climate-change issues, drew just 2.8 million viewers to the network. It was the least watched show among the major broadcast networks Saturday night, trailing repeats of Fox's "Cops," which averaged 4.2 million, and "America's Most Wanted" (4.7 million), and ABC's broadcast of the 2001 movie "Monsters, Inc." (3.4 million).

NBC's telecast included live coverage of musical acts at New Jersey's Giant's Stadium as well as taped bits from concerts around the globe.

But the news was not all bad for "Live Earth" organizer Al Gore, according to ratings spinmeisters at NBC Universal: 19 million people watched at least six minutes of the concerts that aired throughout the day on its networks NBC, Bravo, CNBC and Telemundo. (Nielsen does not measure ratings for Sundance Channel, which also televised the concert.)

Bravo's 18 hours of coverage, beginning at 9 a.m., averaged 740,000 viewers, double what the network usually brings in on a Saturday, and peaked at 9 p.m. with an audience of 1.3 million.

Many television sets were dormant this past holiday week as indicated by the historically low ratings for the broadcast networks. [...]

And

In all, users streamed 30 million videos of Live Earth concert footage on MSN live and on-demand as of Monday morning, said Rob Bennett, GM of entertainment, video and sports at MSN.

Bennett also said that with 237,000 users logged on around midday Saturday, MSN's Live Earth webcast broke the record for most simultaneous viewers of an online entertainment event. The previous record was 175,000 streaming users for Live 8 on AOL.

Bennett said that the on-demand offering of the concert will be available for 90 days and should account for a "majority of the streams" when all the numbers are crunched. He did not have a specific projection but said that the company would provide a recap of the available data at week's end. [...]

Again, while I'd be thrilled with such results, these are paltry compared to the 2 billion viewers that Live Earth believed would tune in.

The real test will be if any viewer actually take any action because of these concerts. Anyone who's been in charge of recruiting people for any kind of activity knows that it is hard to spur anyone to action. And let's face it - the current generation of rock fans are more apathetic than previous generations. This isn't the 60s, and this wasn't Woodstock. If you go to an Eagles concert (who didn't perform at Live Earth), chances are Don Henley would make some plea to get involved in some kind of political or social action - and chances are tmany fans would get involved. But subtract a few decades to the fan base and the activism just isn't there. You can't tell me Kelly Clarkson, Ludacris, and The Smashing Pumpkins have a fan base as political or socially active as Don Henley's.

And because someone likes an artist's music, it doesn't mean they vote the way that artist would vote. I like Pink Floyd and I like The Police, but that doesn't mean I have the same political views as Roger Waters or Sting.