Here's the link: http://on.wsj.com/MEekKq The story includes a cool video. Here's the text.

The Tech Investor Is With the Band

By JOHN JURGENSEN

Music group Moonalice sounds like the Grateful Dead, but has two things that band never did: an internet broadcast network and a private-equity investor for a lead singer. Reporting by WSJ's John Jurgensen.

The Grateful Dead-inspired music of Moonalice is a throwback to the 1960s, but the band's technology is cutting-edge.

Moonalice, consisting of four rock veterans and one heavyweight tech investor, streams every concert (160 of them and counting) live to the Internet. Using a satellite dish the size of a golf umbrella, the band transmits a feed from the bars and clubs it tours, allowing fans anywhere to watch the show in real time on a computer or smartphone. The band offers the high-definition footage free, along with archives of almost every concert since 2010 on the Moonalice website.

The Dead and other jam bands grew by allowing fans to freely trade audio recordings of their concerts. Moonalice goes further by distributing such recordings itself, and is likely the first to routinely beam HD concert video live to fans' iPhones. It's about marketing, but Moonalice says an additional goal is to develop a do-it-yourself strategy for other bands to run with.

SILICON JAM Roger McNamee has both bandmates and private-equity partners.

"We run the band as if we're a Silicon Valley start-up trying to invent something," says Moonalice leader Roger McNamee.

It's a mind-set familiar to the 56-year-old singer, bass player and guitarist. In 2004 he launched private-equity firm Elevation Partners with co-founders including U2's Bono. Some early moves hurt the firm, including investments in Forbes.com and Palm. (Elevation ultimately came out ahead on Palm, Mr. McNamee says.) More recently, Elevation scored with bets on Yelp (the business-reviews site went public in March) and Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg has cited Mr. McNamee as an early adviser, and starting in 2009 Elevation invested $270 million in the social-networking company. That stake is currently worth about $1.1 billion, plus about $170 million already cashed out.

Mr. McNamee has been playing guitar since he was a teenager. He formed Moonalice in 2007 and recorded the band's debut album with producer T Bone Burnett. No record label wanted it. So Mr. McNamee turned the group into a social-media guinea pig. During "Twitter-casts," a link to every song in a concert set is tweeted in succession. A new iPhone app, "Moontunes," connects users to all live and archived concert clips. Such experiments supplement the band's more traditional outreach—touring and selling merchandise.

"At some level it matters intensely who's in the room at night [at a concert]. At another level, we have a second audience, which is this audience on the couch tour," Mr. McNamee said, referring to listeners who experience concerts remotely.

Moonalice's push into video came after a member of its crew, Glenn Evans (who moonlighted until recently as the drummer in '80s metal band Nuclear Assault), started shooting performances. But Mr. Evans was soon swamped by editing footage after concerts.

Now, six small video cameras capture the band as it plays. Standing behind a mixing board and several video monitors, Mr. Evans cuts between the players, including Ann McNamee (Roger's wife), who sings and plays keyboard, or multi-instrumentalist Pete Sears, who like other Moonalice members has performed with offshoots of the Grateful Dead. His live edit goes into formats including feeds for iPhones and Android phones. A dish, typically perched on one of the band's trucks outside the club, transmits the feed up to a satellite. The signal takes less than a minute to reach viewers, who can stream it via a basic 3G connection on their phone.

Mr. McNamee wears his hair long, and favors tie-dye and Hawaiian shirts on stage. He's garrulous, sounding like a laid-back professor when talking about technology and how it's facilitating creativity. He acknowledges that his "day job" subsidizes certain Moonalice operating costs, such as the satellite hookup. The band was told it would take $25,000 to launch, he said, but ended up spending about $100,000. Mr. McNamee predicts that such costs will decline as the technology advances. "I'm not telling other bands to go out and buy a satellite network; the point here is to broadcast everything you do, every night. And that you can do for free in a lot of places" using available Wi-Fi connections.

Does it work for Moonalice? The band says it has delivered two million direct downloads of the track "It's 4:20 Somewhere," which riffs on a familiar drinking song by invoking a time of day associated with smoking marijuana.

Mr. McNamee dismisses the perception that Moonalice is a vanity project, given its roughly 100 performances per year. "You can't spend money to make music happen," he says. "It only works if people are willing to spend time for your music."

Write to John Jurgensen at john.jurgensen@wsj.com