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Instant Concert CDs?
NickRipley writes "Clear Channel (owner of every radio station in America) is purporting to offer a new service, whereby concertgoers can receive an official recording of the concert they just attended, within moments after the final note. How will the RIAA react to this, seeing as this is legitimizing one of the oldest forms of music pirating? Also, what kind of equipment will have to be used to produce these so fast? Will the recording process suffer due to the hurry?"
I don't see why the RIAA would care. They may consider the act of individual listeners recording and distributing concert recordings piracy, but Clear Channel will likely charge $20-30 per recording, making a decent incoming in the process, "legitimizing" the act and thus rendering "piracy" in this case a non-issue.
Assuming these will be highest-possible-quality recordings (who knows) this of course would be a boon for so-called "bootleggers" who would no longer need to participate in the act of recording these shows but instead simply need to buy one copy and run off as many dupes as they need.
is not a radio station company... They are an advertising company that happens to own every radio station in America. It's a shame.
Karma: The shiznight, mostly because I am the Drizzle.
It's only thanks to technology that there is a "recording" industry in the first place. Before performances could be recorded, musicians had to make money through performing their works. Technology, and the ability to record music, created the recording industry.
Is it too surprising, then, if technology might take it away again ?
In my personal opinion, music is about many things.......creation, art, emotion, enjoyment, life. If there is one word which doesn't belong next to the word "music", it's the word "business".
I worked on a production requiring this kind of speed. However, we were using audio cassettes, and the material involved was a spoken presentation that we had permission to duplicate and sell.
This is how it worked: we created a master tape on the fly during the program. At the conclusion of the program, the master was carried down to a workroom with tape duplication machines. We could have 16 tapes created within 4 minutes of the end of the presentation--with more coming. If it was this simple with analog equipment, I'd imagine a digital method for distributing these recordings would be a piece of cake.
...where everything is lip synched anyway.
Well, most of the time anyway.
I can only imagine that the RIAA would squash this one, since traditionally, there would be all sorts of copyright issues here. Royalties go to the Label, Producer, Studio, Artists, RIAA, and who knows who else. Beyond that, a lot of the great artists play cover songs and unreleased material, which they'd have to cover royalties or permissions for that.
However, I would say that I'd pay for concerts of a lot of bands. People like BNL, Dave Matthews, etc. that throw some of the best live shows on earth would be worth it. Of course, since this article implies that you have to attend the concert, and the RIAA has little sway there, this is something that benefits the artists (and Clear Channel).
This would be great, if you can afford a ticket or get a chance. But what about the people in South Dakota that never see anyone, or people overseas who can't make a concert?
If this is something that the artists support, it would be easy to have the recordings ready. Fast burners and digital recording equipment tied into the sound system would make it easy to get these discs out minutes after a concert ends. What would be sad is that most likely, encores and bonus sets would be lost if they cut the recording early.
However, since this looks like something they're going to start in club shows, I'd imagine it's meant to boost new and smaller artists, which is great. I've seen enough small bands that never even crossed the radar of most radio, and it would have been great to hear their sets again.
I'm inclined to say "Great Idea!" but before I do so I'd like to know how much of this $15 would end up in the artists pockets?
If it's anything like Courtney Love's RIAA / Recording Artist math, I think it will just put more cash in the wrong pockets.
Seems like the Artists should get a higher percentage than their standard recording contract might allow, since this would be a major impulse buy on the part of many concert goers - especially considering the effect of various substances and inhibitions.
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What about selling these CDs to customers who did not attend the concert? If my favorite musician is coming nowhere near my town, can I buy one of these CDs? I own all the albums of my favorite groups, so there's just nothing left in the music world for me to buy. Offering these concert CDs for sale to anyone would entice a lot of people in my position to purchase some new music.
Clear Channel (owner of every radio station in America)
LMAO!
This sounds like a great money making scheme... making the RIAA likely to fight it tooth and nail. Just like they did with radio, and tapes, and cds, and now digital music on the 'net. Yup. And in 10 years they'll wonder how they every got by without it.
This Sig Kills Fascists
as described in this article this is not unlike livephish nearly-instant Concert selling website.
http://www.somebaudy.com
Obviously, there will be no post-production editing or enhancing, so you're basically just buying a fancy bootleg, not a CD you'd buy from a store of a live performance. But it shouldn't suck too bad, and it'd sure beat holding up a mini-recorder in the crowd.
(probably a moot point, as I can't see the RIAA letting this happen - unless they're getting a healthy chunk out of the pie.)
This is the instant selling of a live album. Recording a live concert was never piracy as long as you got permission (ignoring that the band may not have the proper rights to the songs, those might belong to the label or songwriter)
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Why would anyone want a CD of a live concert with music and vocals that are really done live. Almost every "live album" you can buy in stores has been redone. Basically, you would get inferior quality music.
Plus lots of bands record with extra instruments that they don't use when they play live. Those are often added in when they make the "live album" for sale.
How will the RIAA react to this, seeing as this is legitimizing one of the oldest forms of music pirating?
Excuse me? Bands have always sold CD's and merchendise at concerts without involvment from the record company - and many bands explicitly allow fan recordings of the concert. Is this just some shameless attempt to bring the word "RIAA" into the post to increase it's chances of getting posted?
A lot of bands with a history of allowing taping (greatful dead, phish , DMB). Now phish is selling all 2003 concerts. They're in both mp3 and shn formats. The SHN format costs more (more bandwidth)..
...Why should I pay for when I can get an audience recording for free?
The have a good FAQ which answers the age old question
They Might Be Giants also gives away tracks on the internet. Better than the dial a song, which used to give away free songs over the phone.
Contrast this with the FooFighters annoying extra track download feature which doesn't work with Mac (Windows Media) and uses a special program which seems to check if the music cd is in the drive.. I like the band but that experience left a bad taste in my mouth.
The bottom line here is that creative bands can have alternative music distribution. This is good, unless your band is already signed, then the label can object.
All you need is a huge rack of cd-duplicator machines... You can buy boxes that you just drop the cd into the top, and a stack of 5, 10, even 20 drives immediately clone the disk. I've even seen some that clone the disk, then drop it into a disk printer. Since concerts generally have the same order, you predo the jewel case inserts, and pre silk-screen the blanks. Record off the mixing board onto a digital source, and immediately burn to a master cd, and drop that into the first duplicator. Then burn another, and drop that into the next duplicator. If you bring a truck to the concert with all that stuff pre-racked and powered, you could easily start churning out a couple of hundred cds every 15 minutes or so.
..of the law of KISS ! (Keep It Simple Stupid)
Because of the hurry You must have a simple microphone config.
Because of the hurry You can't process/"adapt" etc the sound to very often inferior levels the usual CD-recording deps use to do.
Because of all this it will often result in a more dynamic and unfiltrated music.
Sic!
Mundus Vult Decipi
When the boy band du jour finishes their lip-synching performance on stage, Clear Channel can just have the soundtracks ready to go...
Phish is already offering such a service. They even offer MP3 ($9.95 per concert) or SHN (non-lossy) file formats ($12.95 per concert). They are slowly compiling an archive of downloadable media for all their concert recordings, as well. How ya' like dem apples?
Oh great... So now, for $15.99 I can get another poor quality, live recording of my favorite band.
No thanks. I'll wait for them to produce one in the studio so I can actually hear all the instruments and vocals.
From the article:
"the live CDs would probably sell for around $15"
Probably, eh? Lemme break this down: concert t-shirts are generally $10 at the mall, but $20 at the concert. By that same rule, band CDs are $15 at the mall, so I'm guessing they'll be closer to $30 at the concert.
What's your damage, Heather?
How will the RIAA react to this, seeing as this is legitimizing one of the oldest forms of music pirating? Don't know. Don't care.
Also, what kind of equipment will have to be used to produce these so fast?
Uh, a couple cables running from the stereo outs on the mixing board to the line in on a decent PC? Then, after the concert, perhaps a few CD-R drives? The biggest issue would seem to be any editing to get it below 80 minutes, but half-decent audio engineer can trim that stuff down quickly, or they could just do 1 hr shows, or just sell the end, or whatever.
Will the recording process suffer due to the hurry?
Duh? Popular musicians typically sound much better with multiple takes and processing. Some artists are good enough that it's not a big factor, and then of course anything that's improvised (*not* Britney Spears) is different each time.. Possibly better in many people's opinion.
The real killer for an individual live recording for me is sheer nostalgia. I've been to performances that I simply loved. I'd love to take them with me for the rest of my life to listen to and remember back. I've got recordings of a couple of these, but most of them are now lost.
Of course, for most pop artists that are aiming to do the same set every time (aside from "Hello New York/Chicago/Milwaulkee/Seattle/LA!"), just buying the "Live" CD released 6 months afterwards is accurate enough, but still doesn't offer the immediate gratification of buying it as you walk out the door.
Plus, a good performance, as opposed to great, often fades in goodness over time, as your 12 year old mind shifts from Britney to Justin. Selling it immediately will likely milk the cash cow more efficiently. Even better, a lot of those little 12 year old suburbanites can afford to buy the single, the album, the poster, the trapper keeper, the lunchbox, and multiple live recordings.
How is this "legitimizing one of the oldest forms of music pirating"?. Money from selling these recordings would of course go to the artists playing at the concert.
This is a great idea. I would love to buy a CD of the concert that I just experienced. I think everyone who's ever attended a concert and seen all of the audio production going on has thought why the concert producers couldn't do something like this. Being able to take an actual piece of the concert away with you would add a lot of value to expensive concerts.
However, bands would have to worry about concert sales. I'm sure that a couple of hours after a concert ends, all of the audio would be all over the net. Would this effect record sales?
rejected (19) accepted (0)
Is there a psychological term related to getting your stories rejected on slashdot?
Most bootleg tapes, made from one point stereo mics or quasi-binaural mics mounted in eyeglasses, would sound better than a tape from the mixer. The mix would be for the live show, and would sound weird on tape, without the acoustic sounds from the room. I doubt very seriously that CC is going to pony up for a snake split and a second mixer to make an actual "live mix" that would sound like something worth $15. Board tapes are only good for the band to listen to afterward to see where they screwed up/did something cool. If they are gonna just set up a stereo mic pair somewhere in the house and feed it directly into a two-track recorder, they _are_ bootlegging the concert, just like any other Deadhead.
...with their recent Holiday run. The New Year's Eve show was available for download one or two days after the concert as either MP3s or SHNs (lossless compression see Etree for more on the common formats). The price was reasonable ($11/$14 depending on compression) for the equivalent of three CDs of music. The cool thing is that they still allow tapers to record and trade the shows, you just can't trade these sanctioned downloads which presumably sound better. It's a very cool idea though.
all the sudden you have a following and a few dollars in your pocket for your troubles
i'm not a phish head, but i have been to a show. have plenty of friends who can't live without em. . . .
too bad CC has basically taken over concert promotion in addition to the radio. . . ..
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." - Rahm Emanuel
Is this really "legitimizing" unauthorized piracy, or an attempt to undercut it? If you could be guaranteed to get a "professional quality" soudboard recording of the show (i.e. little crowd noise, no hiss, etc.), why even attempt to sneak in recording equipment of your own? IF this works, it could be another revenue stream for the artists involved (thus sating the RIAA, possibly). Their shows are being recorded anyway, why not release good quality recordings (a la Pearl Jam) and beat the bootleggers at their own game?
The labels will have to pay Clear Channel for the privilege of bootlegging the concerts or Clear Channel won't play their bands on the radio.
How does the fact that a concert promoter licenses the ability to create concert CD's legitimize music pirating. This is no different then them playing the music on stations, or selling the bands other CD's. In every case I'm sure that proper royalties are being paid.
-BrentToo bad Clear Channel isn't likely to sponsor concerts by bands I actually give a shit about.
Now that I think of it, they'll be sponsoring "acts" rather than bands. Performers with nameless backup musicians, rather than groups with musicians whose names are known.
I think $15 is a little excessive, considering for a Clear Channel concert you're already paying around $100 a ticket (from what I've read).
As to the "what does the RIAA think of this" quesiton, I'm sure the licensing and fees are already part of this. The RIAA is probably just trying to figure out how to get them to cripple these "instant" concert CDs...
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
Pearl Jam announced a few months ago that for their world tour that's about to begin this month, they'll be putting a live CD of a show on sale within a week of the show. Better yet, if you order via their website, you have the opportunity to download the unmastered MP3 version of the show the day after each show. For people that didn't already know, Pearl Jam released a concert CD for each show of their last show, around $10 from their website IIRC. Very interesting to note that if you go to Epicrecords.com, they are advertising this Pearl Jam deal in big graphics on their front page. FYI, Epic Records is a division of the evil Sony, one of the most vocal RIAA members.
if you go to http://www.livephish.com you can get a copy of the concert in .mp3 or .shn (loss-less compressed sound format) form for $10 or $15 respectively. Pretty good deal for 3 CDs worth of music if you like 20 minute long random jammings that sometimes includes vaccum cleaners as an added instrutment. They just started this since they got back together. Oh and there is no copy security feature to the mp3s or shns, they go by entirely by an honor system. Definitely a cool feature for those who want to grab the concert they attended.
C'mon, why do submitters feel compelled to throw baseless incendiary quips into their story submissions, and why do /. editors always fall for them?
This service does not legitimize piracy any more than a band providing a MP3 on their own website legitimizes piracy.
ClearChannel will have the recording and distribution rights to the concert, what they do with those rights is their business.
I for one am looking forward to this service, I think it's an interesting idea.
As for quality: this will come from the sound equipment straight to the recording device, and they will stamp out CDs. Much better than a crappy hand-held cassette-recorder can do. Yes, the quality will not be as good as a studio album, but you want the live album, right?
The article did say the CD's will be sold to concert-goers, so one could only assume that part of the price would be royalties for the artist.
All you really need to do this is to split each of the signals, run it to a seperate sound board, the output of which feeds either a computer or stand alone CD recorder. Then you just get a huge pile of cd-r media and racks of cd duplicators...[near] instant copies. Not hard and can be done rather cheaply -- the biggest cost would probably be the duplicators -- we've got a 1x7 that runs at 24x that cost over a grand, as I recall -- you could easily get 20 or 30 thousand in duplicators.
Pearl Jam has down this(ok, the cds arent available AT the show) for years.
Phish is now releasing each concert online no more than 2 days after a show in mp3($10.95) and shn($12.95) formats(shn is a lossless compression of a wav/aiff file that can be expanded to its original format)
other bands havea "on-the-road" series similar tothe Pearl Jam format with cds shipping a week after the show.
nothing new here
the history of the world
I did a consulting gig with ClearChannel a few years ago and a fellow consultant suggested this to them then. There are many reasons this is a good idea:
1) Artists own their own performances. This is the reason why Record Labels don't really make money off of concerts. It is up to them and their artist representation as to what they do with their recordings of them.
2) CDs distributed at street-level and concerts are an effective form of promotion - one that is very effective. . . The Wu-Tang Clan and The Grateful Dead know this cold and they did great even though they NEVER got airplay. (CCU is diluting their radio prowess a bit here - but don't thell them that).
3) Music has a great "hook" into your memory. How many times have you heard a piece of music and it reminded you of some past situation when you heard it? How great would it be to have the EXACT rendition of that concert and the good time your friends had? Bill Graham (the famous San Fran concert promoter) both understood this and encouraged it.
4) If you love a band (say RadioHead), and you go to more than one of their concerts (say MSG and Philly Spectrum), wouldn't you like to buy them both if they were unique experiences? How about a digital season's pass (over the web) to ALL of their concerts? (with video). Would you pay the equivalent of a box-set to have that kind of access? I would. . . most people would for their favorite band (if they have the coin).
The sky is the limit with these opportunities and there isn't much that the RIAA can do about it. This is the kind of liberation tha technology makes possible. . . There is more value because there is more PRODUCT. There is more product, because there is more access to the ARTIST. Let's hope this catches on before the Label's start asking for exclusive rights to concerts and concert-proceeds.
No, when its done without the permission of the copyright holder it is pirating.
When it is done with permission it is call an over-priced souvenir.
Like it or not this is the way thing work. Don't think that it should work this way? Try to change it - don't just bitch about it.
I have great faith in fools - self confidence my friends call it. - Edgar Allan Poe
The actual accounting (also reported in countless previous links) means that after the studio's self-declared expenses are deducted, the band not only rarely makes much beyond the initial advance, but often ends up owing the studio money on paper. This can lock them in, forcing them to sign for additional albums (to have the debt forgiven) and making it hard to switch labels.
I could enumerate many more abuses, but I'm sure others will -- if they're not sick of doing so.
NOW COMES THE EVIL PART
The studios (or RIAA) don't have any right to the music the musicians play in concert, unless there is a specific concert recording clause. This was the meat on the musician's table. but now the largest promoter in the nation will be making it a term of their contracts that bands must surrender most rights to the music in their precious live performances. Note: Clear Channel never said a word about paying artists. It's be a condition of the concert: "If you don't sign over the rights, you don't play in this town". [We've also seen plenty of articles on the strong-arm methods Clear Channel has used to build and enforce precisely this sort of monopoly.
This won't improve anything for most bands. It only applies to the known successes where Clear Channel expects to make a profit; the ones where CC is already profiting as the concert promoter. If Clear Channel didn't book you for a concert or performance, don't expect their audio truck.
In short: they are reaching deeper into the artist's pockets -- and removing (coopting) a potential source of revenue for the band itself. The recording industry was a historical artifact, like buggy whip makers. It gained its stranglehold because 100 years ago, musicians could not afford studio equipment. Now they can, so the strangle hold much be maintained in other ways.
This is a coerced corporate seizure of the band's rights to the proceeds of their own live *performances* (concerts, shows, etc.) which had been the last bastion of the musician. They are doing this preemptively, because it's now a small step from the club/concert audio feed to a burned CD -- and right now sales of such CDs could well belong to the musician, if the corporations are not careful!
Clear channel owns about half of the stations. If they don't promote/play bands that don't play along, the bands may feel there is no choice. If the band gets a cut I see no problem with this, but if they don't then it's pretty nasty, imho. ...
I would suck to loose almost half your fans because you didn't like somebody taking some profit off your only opportunity to make some ching. After all, most profits are from T-Shirts, and if CD's take sales from shirts