NEW YORK • Music festivals and concert tours can be a huge hassle.
They're too hot, too crowded, too loud, too expensive and often too far away.
But just because you couldn't make it to music festival Lollapalooza, or you can't afford to see music power couple Jay-Z and Beyonce, doesn't mean you're condemned to a life without live music.
This is boom time for catching classic concert films, award-winning music documentaries and contemporary live performances online.
Scroll through YouTube, for example, and you can easily find things like NPR's Tiny Desk Concerts or short indie rock sets at the KEXP studios - free and legally uploaded.
The PBS app features select songs from Austin City Limits and whole episodes of Great Performances.
The free website and app Red Bull TV live-streams an array of music festivals. And big subscription services like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Hulu offer excellent music specials and docs.
Then there's Stingray Qello. Some of its offerings are available through the platforms listed above, but Qello has the edge in its breadth and in the quality of its curation.
The site and app are easy to browse by artist, genre and era; and there are thousands of concerts, documentaries and music-focused TV series to pick from, ranging from the mid-20th century to now.
For an All Access Pass, Qello costs US$7.99 (S$10.90) a month or US$69.99 a year. Non-subscribers can sample Qello using the QelloTV page, which streams an assortment of videos all day and night on 33 genre-specific channels.
Subscribers get to choose what they want and when, either watching programmes in full or skipping straight to individual songs and scenes. Subscribers can also compile their favourite performances into video "setlists".
Here is a look at some of the best of what Qello offers:
DOCUMENTARIES
Qello is stocked with documentaries that cast a wide net across individual careers and entire genres, be it the classic rock of Tom Petty, as exhaustively explored in Peter Bogdanovich's Runnin' Down A Dream, or the West Coast singer-songwriter revolution of James Taylor and Carole King, as seen in Troubadours.
One of the must-sees is No Direction Home: Bob Dylan. Director Martin Scorsese and editor David Tedeschi do a masterly job of turning archival material and interviews into an enlightening study of an enigmatic artist. No Direction Home explains how American popular culture changed over the course of an eventful half-decade.
CONCERT FILMS
One of Qello's more valuable functions is as a repository for performances that were otherwise languishing on out-of-print VHS tapes or hard-to-find DVDs, from Tupac Shakur's fiery set at the House of Blues to a performance by Joni Mitchell in front of a gallery of her own paintings.
The site has classics of the genre and beloved obscurities.
An example is Queen: Live At Wembley Stadium. One of rock's greatest live bands is represented on Qello by concerts from pretty much every era - from the big-haired, operatic 1970s to the leather-clad New Wave 1980s.
Start with the 1986 Wembley Stadium gig, which runs nearly two hours, balances big hits and deep cuts, and features both lead vocalist Freddie Mercury and guitarist Brian May in exceptional form.
MUSIC TV SERIES
Qello has several episodes each of the venerable TV series MTV Unplugged and Soundstage, featuring artists as eclectic as Eric Clapton, Placebo, Macy Gray and Alanis Morissette.
Qello is also the home of the excellent Classic Albums series, in which artists like the Who, Steely Dan and Pink Floyd sit behind mixing boards and revisit their best-known records.
One of them is MTV Unplugged: Lauryn Hill. This 2001 set debuted Hill's first new songs since her Grammy-winning smash The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill and also presented a different side of her - at once vulnerable and at times unnervingly loquacious.
The performance is a mesmerising look at a pop star who dared to reinvent herself in public.
NYTIMES
