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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.
It's great that Phish has decided to make a lossless format available as well as the lossy mp3s. etree.org has been doing this for a number of years, and a method of distribution has been developed that preserves the quality of the audio as it passes through many hands.
etree.org offers legal show recordings from bands that promote the taping of their shows. The bands get free publicity, the fans get free recordings -- it works out for both parties.
Phish is pretty typical in that they only allow audience recordings (no soundboard access) and they sell (generally) better sounding soundboard recordings.
Anyone who's been to a Phish show can tell you about the legions of folks with high-gain mics and DAT/miniDisc units taping the whole show. Used to be that they'd have RCA patch bays coming off the soundboard that you could pull a post-mix feed from.
Rather enlightened, IMHO.
-JPJ
Feh.
The Grateful Dead started legal concert taping years ago, eventually setting aside stageside sections for tapers where they could set up mic booms and their DAT recorders. These concerts (plus those of Phish, Allman Bros, Dead satellite groups, etc) for the past five-six years have been available on Etree which is essentially a clearinghouse for FTPs with .shn versions of these shows. Been downloading them for years. From the site: "You can find nearly every band that allows taping in the jambands community on etree.org, including Phish, The Grateful Dead, The Seth Yacovone Band, String Cheese Incident, The Slip, Medeski, Martin & Wood, Umphrey's McGee, The Big Wu, Amfibian and The New Deal."
I would venture to say that these same Phish shows will be available on Etree sites, so why does livephish think people will pay for what they A) can get free already from Etree or B) will almost certainly end up on Etree anyway?
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.
"The pie shall be cut in half and each man shall receive.....death. I'll eat the pie."
The quality of these recordings will far surpass the quality of someone standing in the crowd with a mic. We've all heard those and they suck. These recordings will be recorded off the sound board; the quality will be amazing -- anyone who has done this before can attest to this. Essentially every inch of the stage and every item on the stage has a mic, and each is individually leveled on the board. The recordings for sale will be directly from this.
I would love to see the Dave Matthews Band start selling soundboard recordings of live shows.
There was an article once discussing the technical aspects of how the band's sound crew digitally record every show.
We're talking crazy here, they fill up hard drives with recorded digital sound, and send the harddrives off to be archived to like 200+ cd's for the full digital mix of the show.
trust me, these recordings are amazing! hope to see DMB releasing some of these in the near future! (this would be so much better than the crap-show they released as Live at Folsom)
When Pearl Jam [Ten Club, Synergy] sold the official bootlegs for their 2000 tour, they didn't care if you traded the boots. So if you bought the CDs, fine, and if you wanted to trade/download them, thats fine too.
B
Hey, they could have saved on bandwidth costs if they used the Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC). Check it out at flac.sourceforge.net. It's pretty cool.
G.
This story upsets me. For years, I've been a Dave Matthews Band fan, another band which allows live taping of their shows. One of the great things about live taping is the community that gets built around the band, without the band being directly involved. I've met so many great people through trades and message boards.
Since the policy states that copies can't be made for other people, the entire network of live performance trading (for Phish, anyways), has just been destroyed, and the community that the trading has created with it.
I hope the band enjoys their $10 or $13, but it may cost them fans in the long run, and I hope it does. This is not a good precedent to set.
Should DMB ever go this way with their taping policy, I guarantee that they won't see another dime from me. Live performances is what first excited me about DMB, and the grassroots support that they had (and still do) via the trading network is a beutiful thing, and should be preserves. Yes, even in the face of the almighty dollar.
I have already downloaded the 1st concert they have up (in mp3), and the quality is great. The recording was made from a direct patch to the soundboard, so the quality is identical to any live album they would normally put out (minus the little bit of audio loss in an mp3 compression). For a Phish fan, this is great.
Other artists should take note that all Phish did was listen to the needs of their community! The Shn format is not very popular, but amongst the taping community it is thanks to etree.org. It will be very interesting to see how this service affects their live taping policy. Phish's live taping policy is much more restrictive than most because they do not offer soundboard patches. Tapers are forced to use expensive mic and preamp rigs ($5000+) if they want to get anything close to soundboard sound. Live concert taping with microphones is part art, part science, and there are quite a few people who take it way too seriously. The other major restriction of the Phish taping policy is once they release an album of a concert, that concert cannot be distributed online. I would imagine this service will not qualify as an "album."
The next big step for this service will be the distribution of the Phish archives, Phish has recorded every concert from about 1990 on, possibly even earlier. Most of the recordings are multitrack DAT with audience mics to capture the crowd sounds. I would imagine the Grateful Dead will seek to duplicate this model if it is successful. A few years from now we might have every Grateful Dead and Phish show online, remastered SBD recordings. Today is a happy day for jamband fans. A little message to the authors of the "Phish sucks" posts, stick to Creed.