Exactly one year ago, I wrote a blog entry about an experiment by a music promoter to start selling professionally recorded versions of concerts on CD-R immediately after the gig. I thought it was a stupendous idea–I still do–but I haven’t heard anything more about it. Until today.
The Barenaked Ladies are currently on tour, and according to their blog they are going to be running with this idea themselves rather than leaving it to their promoters:
“We’re going to be recording most of the shows on this tour, and they will be available for sale online for download or we’ll send you a CD. Check out www.barenakedladies.com next week, and you’ll see more info. We intend to have these available about 2 days after each show – hopefully you like this new addition to our tours, and hopefully the sound quality is better than your cellphone or minidisk player, etc. We’ve got an engineer on the road with us who will be recording the shows to multitrack and mixing them specifically for CD, which should make each disc more of the Rock Spectacle quality and less like a board tape, which rarely sound great, simply because they’re mixed for the venue, not for home listening.”
Okay, so the recordings won’t be on sale immediately as you leave the gig, and the practice of artists themselves selling recordings of individual concerts after the fact is not new. But it’s still not exactly common. Big yay to the BNL for giving it a try.
There is a company set up to try and do this for some bands:
http://www.munckmix.com
The String Cheese Incident (coming this way in March) have been doing this for a while.
Also, why pay at all for bands that allow concert recording?
http://www.etree.org/
As more bands start the process of selling their concert recordings it may become less common to allow concert-goers to patch into the soundboard.
There are some legal hassles – Dylan didn’t allow The Dead to release portions of their 2003 concerts that he appeared on, though other artists have granted licenses.