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Phish to Sell Downloads of Concerts
zzyzx writes "Phish have a new system for distributing their music. At livephish.com they will be selling their soundboard concert recordings. Most 2-3 hour concerts will cost $10 to download in mp3 format, $13 to download in the lossless shn format. What makes this interesting is that they're putting no DRM on these files at all. How are they protecting themselves? One paragraph in their Faq: 'Live Phish Downloads relies on an honor system, and we ask that you do not abuse the unrestricted nature of these files. If you would like to see this type of delivery of shows continue and flourish, please respect our taping policy and don't abuse the system.'" The honor system has served them well in the past, what with allowing their fans to record their concerts while also selling both studio and live albums.
SHN FAQ has some info and links regarding what shn is.
Wow. That was largely uninformed. Sonically, a good live recording should not be much (if at all) different from a studio recording. The one exception might be background audience noise.
And performance wise, live recordings have a tendency to be much better.
A few extremely good examples spring to mind:
Genesis - All of their live albums
Renaisance - Day of the Dreamer
Rush - Different Stages Live
Celibidache - Bruckner - Sym. 8
Obviously you do not participate in (or were cognizant of the existance of) the activity of "tape-trading". Many of the shows I've collected sound as good, if not better than those produced and sold by "the man". These days its not uncommon for tapers to get direct feeds off the soundboards.
Perhaps you should visit the Internet Archive, specifically the Audio section that deals with Etree / lossless recording. Over the past few months they've been actively aquiring and archiving shows (in shn and flac format) from taper friendly bands. Phish opt'd out of the archive, probably because they were working on thier own distribution system (which we are now seeing the genisis of).
Download a couple of shows (if you got the bandwidth), convert and burn to audio CD. I think you might be pleasantly suprised. And the kicker is, there is quite a broad selection of acts hosted. Six months ago I never heard of String Cheese Incident.....
There is a peer to peer network (in beta) for only bands like Phish and the Dead that allow taping. It's called furthurnet.org. There is a java client that works fairly well in Linux, too. I've grabbed tons of cool stuff from there - Hendrix, Neil Young, Built to Spill, Phish - there's a huge list of bands. And they have .shn and .mp3s currently, eventually there will be video too.
Besides, doesn't charging for taped concerts kind of go against the concert-tapes-as-promotion philosophy? The reason the Dead were the most successful concert band of all time was partially due to the free availability of tons of concert tapes. I know livephish has to pay for bandwidth, but this is a much larger divergence from the Dead/Phish philosophy of free concert music than people seem to believe.
A couple points:
- Phish does not allow soundboard patches at their shows (due to the illegal foreign "import" scene). These soundboard recordings will naturally sound better than your typical audience recording. I'll pay for the quality. Some of my audience recordings sound great. Others sound like they were recorded in a tin can.
- You can still freely trade any audience tape/mp3/shn. In fact, Phish just modified their taping/trading policy to allow ANY audience recording to be traded online (Taping Policy). The previous policy prohibited the online trading of audience recordings if a commercial release of the same show was available.
- How is this any different from the live Grateful Dead releases (i.e. Dick's Picks)? You won't find any of the Dick's Picks releases on etree. Seems to me like they are embracing a new medium.
sadly, phish has not credited etree.org for the wide distribution it has facilitated.
Anything you say will be held against you.
I can't believe this got modded up as Informative. What you said is true, but Phish is definitely NOT one of these bands. Phish has gotten its reputation by performing excellent live shows. I understand that you are saying that here is more to a Phish show than the music (the people, the parking lot scene, the drugs, etc.) and you are right. But the music is what holds the entire scene together.
Phish has a free live show available for download on phishlive.com. Go and listen to it and get a taste of what Phish really sounds like.
david "zzyzx" steinberg,
paul glace at Phantasy Tour and the crew at etree.org with their nearly anal quality hounds tracking the the recording status and quality of most legally traded music on the internet.
Live distribution shows what a dynamic band this really is. Not a cookie cutter, same show every night type band! Check them out.
Anything you say will be held against you.
you are incorrect here. the non distribution only affects the soundboard recordings released by the band, not the audience tapers that are there. Just like DMB. DMB also does not allow soundboards to be released. And, at least, phish as resonable ticket prices, not the $75/person charged by dave.
Anything you say will be held against you.
75$!!!
um not the last time I saw dave. It was more like 35$ and that was towards the end of their last tour. good show too.
-
As another poster has mentioned, etree has very little to do with the actual exchange of the recordings. The Furthur network, otoh, is a P2P network that only traffics in live recordings of bands that allow taping.
Perhaps the most surprising band that allows/encourages audience taping and trading of such tapes is Metallica, perhaps most famous in these parts for their stance on Napster.
Audiophiles (most of the live taping trend in Dead, Phish, SCI, etc) are VERY serious about the quality of their recordings.
I actually prefer a AUD (audience) taped show than an SBD b/c of the crowd noise. I like to hear the reaction (especially if I hadn't been there) of the people listening to the show. It's amazing to hear what the Grateful Dead or String Cheese does to people. You hear them in their best.
SBD's are PERFECT copies of the show. No noise, etc. They are copied to DAT and then piped through usually SoundForge then to CDR. Many SHN versions of shows have a great lineage: SBD>DAT>SoundForge>CDR.
Don't talk about things you don't know about, please.
Are you a US citizen? Are you a citizen of a country which protects intellectual property through copyright laws? That's the point at which you agreed. The license is on the outside of the package and it looks like a C with a circle around it.
I'm not sure about your parent's post about the "license" but any time you recieve a work that is copyrighted, you are automatically bound by copyright law, without having to sign or agree to anything.
All a license does is give you EXTRA rights aside from that already granted to you via copyright law (fair use). Under copyright law, if you recieve (because you paid for it, or obtained it in other legal ways) a work without any type of license, that means that you are 100% restricted to not redistribute the work. The only copies you are allowed are fair use copies, etc.
If an EULA or license does not grant you extra rights, sometimes they do bad and _RESTRICT_ those rights guaranteed to you by copyright law. In these cases, those parts of the EULA are effectively unenforceable. No EULA can restrict fair use and be valid.
So in a sence, your right, you didn't sign or accept any agreement when you purchased the work. On the other hand, you are not legally allowed to do anything except listen to it consistant to the fair use clause in US copyright law, and not copy it under any other circumstances. So you are in fact bound, but not by a contract, but by US Criminal law, wether you accept any extra agreements/EULA's or not.
In effect, the "spirit" of your parent is correct, though it is technically incorrect.
cheers >
Two infinite things: your stupidity and mine. But I'm not sure about the latter. If my sig offends you, I'm sorry.
someone (possibly me) really needs to organize a emailing campaign to let phish know that some of us would like to see these very same files available in ogg (lossy, equivalent to mp3) and flac (lossless, equivalent to shn) formats. here's a great opportunity to promote our favorite royalty free media formats!