Be there, declared the posters. The marketing campaign for Woodstock: The Movie promised much. According to the bread-heads, if you weren't in the mud with half a million hippies in '69, the next best thing was watching the event in a cinema with popcorn to hand. Not so much tune in and drop out as turn up and veg out.

Forty years on, the sales song for concert movies remains the same. Getting ready to invade theatres with all the subtlety of King Kong on heat is Shine a Light, Martin Scorsese's film of the Rolling Stones performing at New York's Beacon Theatre in 2006. The hoopla starts next Wednesday with the London premiere beaming live to 100 cinemas across Britain - eight in Scotland - before the film's general release on April 11.

With Shine a Light and the recent 3D movies of gigs by U2 and Hannah Montana, the concert movie is going the way of all ageing rockers and stageing a comeback. John Williamson, music journalist and academic, is among those reluctant to wave a Zippo lighter in celebration. "In general, concert films are deeply flawed concepts," he says. "So much of a concert is the actual experience, as opposed to just the visuals or the audio. It's very rare, even with the best filmmakers on board, to capture that."

But punters using their imagination does not make the music industry's tills go ker-ching. In the file-sharing age, concert movies, DVDs and videos are, to use a phrase that never passed Elvis's lips, valuable alternative revenue streams. You might not have been able to sell a body part in time to get a ticket for Take That's Beautiful World tour, but pay Amazon £13.98 and you can watch Gary Barlow singing Relight My Fire, complete with flames dancing along his sleeve, whenever you like.

The Beautiful World DVD is probably not the concert movie to name-check in informed company. For afficionados, The Last Waltz occupies the number-one slot in the all-time top ten. The fare- well concert of the Band was remarkable for the guest stars it attracted - among them Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Clapton, and Van Morrison - and the young man in the director's chair: one Martin Scorsese.

Scorsese had been an assistant director on Woodstock, but The Last Waltz is to that bloated love-in what Mean Streets is to Confessions of a Window Cleaner. Using a team of renowned cinematographers and a specially designed stage, Scorsese mixed footage of live performances with his own interviews, achieving harmony between music and movie-making, and setting the standard for all who would dare follow.

The best concert films are the ones that make for a satisfying movie experience, says Shane Danielsen, former artistic director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival. "It's about the cinematography, the editing, lighting, and set design, same as for any movie. That said, if the music is not to your taste, these things won't necessarily convert you. Even if it had been shot by Christopher Doyle and edited by Thelma Schoonmaker, you still couldn't drag me to a concert movie by Sting."

A great concert movie, then, requires not the X factor but the M one - exceptional music, the capturing of a moment and the presence of a maestro, usually but not always called Marty. For Shine a Light, Scorsese has again drawn his cameramen from the A-list of cinematographers. With the likes of John Toll (The Thin Red Line) and Robert Elswit (There Will Be Blood) present, prepare for some awesome lenswork. Just don't expect to see anything unflattering or scandalous: Jagger, Richards, Watts and Wood are, after all, the film's executive producers.

Initially, Mick Jagger thought the band's beach performance in Rio, for a million fans, had the makings of a landmark concert movie. In a rare instance of rock's ultimate "power freak" (Keef's words) backing down, he was persuaded by Scorsese that a smaller gig would be more beautiful.

"The issue was, ultimately, why are we making this film?" says Scorsese. "The Stones are probably the most documented band in history. There are so many documentaries with people saying, Yeah, I worked with so-and-so back in 1973.' That didn't interest me. The music, its performance, that's what was important."

To attract younger audiences, Jagger asked Christina Aguilera and Jack White to guest-star. Whether Scorsese has done enough to make a Last Waltz for Generation iPod remains to be seen. The Hollywood Reporter was underwhelmed, describing it as "simply another in a long line of Rolling Stones concert films".

But fans' appetite for live music, allied to advances in technology, mean the concert movie is not about to go the way of the eight-track. "Traditionally, live albums and footage had quite a bad reputation in that people perceived them as being a stopgap, something that was put out because there was no new material," says John Williamson. "In the past five years there has been a real shift away from recorded music towards people going to see gigs, so you can understand why there's a sudden interest in concert movies and live albums."

With fans bombarded by so many different ways to consume music, the live concert offers something unique, says Ken Garner, senior lecturer in journalism at Glasgow Caledonian University (who rates Prince's Sign o' the Times and Jonathan Demme's Talking Heads film Stop Making Sense as concert movies worth watching again). "The notion of being there, the authenticity of the live moment, is now valued more than ever."

The future for the concert movie is live and digital, with events transmitted via satellite or broadband. You can already sit in a Glasgow cinema and see a live performance from the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Rock stars, for the time being, still prefer their movie appearances recorded and edited. While the big screen might match their egos, they're not ready for live close-ups of love handles and chord changes just yet. It might only be rock 'n' roll, but there are limits.