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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.
Live concert recordings usually aren't that good, so this is analgous to them seeling a a 64kbps MP3. While it may get spread around, the recording is bad enough that it publicizes the band but still ensures users will want to hear a better studio recording.
What is the problem.
Music is more then the sum of the components, and also varies with your personal taste.
Lots of bands sound "crappy" live compared to the polished studio music, but there is much more to a performance then the sound.
This is totally in the Grateful Dead tradition of viral marketing.
The Dead let people tape and trade their shows, but you couldn't sell them. The traders developed a barter system, and soundboard copies of shows were top dog in the barter system. You could get 3-4 non-soundboard shows for one soundboard.
So now Phish will provide people with REALLY high quality bootlegs of shows for $10 (I guess bootleg isn't really the right term). People will buy them. For certain. And this puts MORE Phish music out there, and makes people more likely to go to their concerts and buy their studio releases - and that is the real goal. They know people will copy and trade these shows for free - again - that is the goal. They just give anyone an easy way to get any concert for $10. That is a lot of value compared to checking bartering message boards and trying to come up with a valuable enough trade.
A smart business move by Phish. The Dead made their shows tradeable, and had more concert attendance in the 1980s and 1990s than any other band. They made a lot of cash from their shows, and from their merchandising.
We knew Page was running a DAT right off the board for like 10 years now, and I was wondering if they were ever going to do anything with it.
It's a good idea, really, since there are a LOT of people who go to the shows, but don't know a taper, or have the patience or bandwidth for etree. It's a cool idea to know that you can get a tape of the shows you've actually been to, especially with soundboard quality.
Lars' comment has long been taken out of context. His complaint was "no one asked me if I want to participate", in reference to file trading online. Sure, Metallica allowed fans to trade music early on in their career, but METALLICA made this choice, not the fans.
Something lost in this tiresome debate between the RIAA and geeks worldwide, too fucking cheap to buy a CD but spend ungodly amounts of money on computer gear, is what do the artists want? Phish seems to want to let fans download their music online, with limitations of course. Does this mean every musician wants this? Does Phish speak for an entire industry? No, they do not. They merely speak for their own little band and their own little band doesn't mind a little file trading of their concerts.
Many seem to think they can do whatever the fuck they want but let's spin this in a way many here can understand. What if I took some GPL'ed code and built a proprietary app with it. Say, for instance, I took GIMP and made it usable by the print industry and fixed the horrible UI. Then I went to sell the application online and made millions on my new Photoshop killer and I refused to relinquish the source code despite the incessant whining of the geek community over violating their license.
When you copy music you have done the exact same thing. You have violated a license, an agreement between you and the copyright holder. Phish allows for more lenient terms in licensing of their copyrights. Other bands aren't as amenable to these terms and stick with the standard copyright license as set forth in US and foreign law.
In my opinion, you have absolutely no fucking right to cry foul when your rights are being violated if you willfully violate the rights of others.
SHN is very usefull for archives. It is also very usefull for listening to. Imagine you want to store your master copy of all your music on a hard drive in a computer along with the rest of your stero system. Now imagine you want to replicate audio CD's for friends (this is legal for all the bands that allow taping at concerts, phish allows you to distribute SHN's of their shows if they were taped by independant tapers)
So you can listen to these SHN's on your stero, and if you want a MP3 CD for your car, you just run the shn's through a perl script, and now you have an MP3 cd of the same material. Now imagine a friend stops by with some CD-R's and wants to spin a few disks of the new shows you just downloaded off etree. just stick the blank in, and run it through a perl script, and boom, instant audio cd with no compression loss.
MP3's are good for the end result, but for the source file, you dont want mp3, you want lossLESS. and SHN will cut most wav's in half. Not only this, but data integrity of SHN's is much better than storing your master copy in an "audio CD" because of the way the data is encoded onto the medium (audio cd's do not have as much redundancy on a disk, so a scratch will lose data, whereas, on a data disk you have redundant encoding on the media itself)
For all these reasons, SHN is good for just about everything. Too bad my car MP3 disk player doesn't support SHN's.
Two infinite things: your stupidity and mine. But I'm not sure about the latter. If my sig offends you, I'm sorry.
See, despite what Hilary Rosen would have you believe, music fans WANT to support musicians.
A lot of music "fans" want whatever is cool at the moment, regardless of quality, tied to a carefully marketed star*. Until that star becomes uncool (ie. not the latest and most heavily played), and suddenly all their former "fans" are talking trash and pretending they never cared much for them. Refer to file labeled "Spice Girls". Groups like this can't market music the same way Phish (or any other truly good band) does, simply because Phish has nurtured a community for years, and their live shows are unique works of art which lend themselves to the bootleg scene. Phish's fans will be glad to pay a few bucks for a good live recording, they respect the band and know the band respects them.
Oh the irony. The music industry is so hooked on the fast heavy cash generated by the Britneys and P. Diddy's they hype, that they've effectively generated a fan base who care nothing for the shallow music they consume, and thus feel little guilt about "stealing intellectual property". Ah, Hilary, live and learn.
* arguably these people are barely "musicians", definitely not "Artists" and can legitimately be called "performers".
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