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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.
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.
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.