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Instant Live Concert Recordings
WebGangsta writes "The AP is reporting that there's a new device out that allows you to record a concert... legally. It works because it's run by the venue, direct from the mixing board. After the show, concert-goers visit an on-site kiosk and purchase a 128MB keydrive (which may or may not be proprietary to the system). Then they swipe their credit card again to download the concert they just attended to the keydrive. The MP3 can then be shared with whoever they'd like (no restrictions on copying the show to friends)." We've had some previous stories about a different system with CD-R's available after the show.
...I'll be the one with the CD duplicator selling blank CDr's for $1 each.
666-607: 6th floor apartment of the beast
Why are concert recordings illegal? Is it like taping a movie at the theater?
I am defenseless. Use your button. Mod me down with all of your hatred.
paying for the CD and then ripping it myself. Amongst other things, I'd have the hard copy (or at least harder copy) in a theoretically uncompressed format.
$45 for a T-shirt, $8 - Coke, $500 - for a Pen drive - showing your friends you can't manage money....priceless
Sig removed by order of FBI Patriot ACT
If artists get a cut (more than the RIAA approved 1%) then I'm all for it.
If, on the other hand, it's artists only chance to make real money getting fucked over by yet another greedy corp (in this case Clear Channel the venue owners in a lot of places), then it's a bit much.
Beep beep.
128 meg stores just over ninety minutes of 192kbps/44kHz MP3. The article says this will be mostly used for independant artists who don't care about sharing their live music, so I guess Rush, Yes, and the Rolling Stones aren't an issue. But the Grateful Dead (who I believe allow recording) couldn't fit a show on there.
Hmm... USB keys with little bears on them... or perhaps a "combination" keychain/pipe!
For bands I've seen in smaller bars and clubs, I can't tell you the number of times I bought their CD (usually self-published) on the way out if I had a good time (as well as how many drinks I knocked down =D )
It's certainly smart to present the concert goer with the ability to make an impulse buy, right after they're coming off the high of enjoying a great concert ...
Don't expect something that sounds like like "At Fillmore East" or "Live at Leeds." Feeds taken from a mixing console were intended to be routed to a PA system playing at ear-splitting volumes, not a 2 track master EQ'd for home listening. Making great-sounding live recordings in and of itself is quite an art form.
Pearl Jam has been doing something very similar for at least two years. My wife and I went to a concert here in Denver. Afterwards, we hit their web site and ordered the concert recording. We were immediately able to download an MP3. Later, we received a CD featuring the same concert with cleaned up audio.
It's a shame no one's giving PJ credit for this awesome idea.
--AC
Sounds awful. Most bootleggers (of the legal variety, I do not consort with thieves ... erm, yeah) would rather pluck off their own ears than listen to, let alone pay for, a crappy mp3 concert that they had been to live.
I've been active on etree, StG, and similar for years, and before that I traded hand to hand. General rule (not of thumb, it's just a rule): if it's compressed, it's crap. We don't want it, and we don't want it to propogate. Because, assuredly, some dope will take his mp3 keychain, and pop it into Nero or whatever they have these days, and print out his own CD. Which will then be traded, and there will be a very sub-standard concert floating around.
"What we were seeing is that a large number of people were taking their CDs home and ripping them to MP3s, so we thought it would benefit music fans to eliminate that middle step," Reilly said.
First of all, I've learned never to trust anyone else when it comes to encoding audio. Secondly, if you can download the concert immediately afterwards, there's obviously no quality check step to make sure everything came out okay.
128M for 110s of recording time comes out to approx: 160kb/s. Totally unacceptable for live concerts.
First off, it's "Jerry".
Secondly, there are other bands that do this: Pearl Jam, the Allman Brothers, and I'm pretty sure Phish, among others.
(Sit back and moderate? Comment? What's a slashdotter to do...)
With all the DCMA/DRM/copyright FUD being thrown from monkey to monkey these days, it seems that some of us forget that recording a concert is not inherently illegal. There are many, many artists who encourage the taping and distributing of their live shows -- here's a list of more than 900 of them. Furthermore, there's even a P2P client dedicated to sharing 100%-legal music. That's right folks, the RIAA doesn't have anything to do with this.
Before I sit around and watch the comments pile up, there have been "devices" available for years that allow you to record a concert legally -- they're called tape recorders. These days, many serious hobbyist tapers are moving to a digital-only setup to cut down on loss of audio quality. (Wish I could give you model numbers or something, but that's what Google's for folks...)
Now, the "instant" bit of this is what's actually interesting. 'Course, you're dependent upon the venue for all this, and we know how much us slashdotters like being dependent upon stuff that doesn't smell like open-source/community-owned...
$ echo "ceci n'est pas une pipe" | sed -Ee 's/(eci n|pas )//g'
Despite all the sturm und drang over DRM'ed concert releases being the next big thing on the horizon, at least one band ignored the DRM bandwagon. Barenaked Ladies used the resources of their promoter Nettwerk (and not through their record company) to release MP3s of each concert during the first leg of their tour this year. You can download any of the bunch direct from their web site, for $13.99. What complicated, strings-attached scheme do they use to transfer the music? That's right, a friggin' ZIP file. Pay your money, pull down your concert, enjoy the MP3s. I'm proud to say I bought two of their shows, one I personally attended, and a second just because I heard other fans rave about the particular show. Trust us, RIAA, and we'll keep you wealthy with products like this. Don't treat us like friggin' thieves.
RW
How about a CD with CDDA audio?
Same quality. Sure, FLAC can fit 2x as much audio on a CD, but consider the number of CD players out there that play CDDA but not FLAC.
Better yet, how about 192kbps Vorbis?
And about this MP3 "crap":
In double-bind studies, self-proclaimed "audiophiles" were unable to tell the differece between a 256kbps MP3 (CBR, encoded with FLAC) and the uncompressed CD.
Now, of course, you don't want to transcode from one lossy format to another (or to another bitrate, for that matter). That's the true advantage of FLAC.
If I went to a show and it was good, I'd definitely pay $10.00 to download a digital copy of it.
:)
But if you are half drunk and trying to work some kiosk, you'll probably pay $40.00 for a copy of a terrible show, perhaps even accidentally paying for it twice as you fumble around with the keychain while trying not to spill your beer.
+5:offtopic,but anti-American
The only advantage I see for this is that the keychains could be reusable, but even then, the cost of a burned CD is practically negiliable assuming this service costs more than $1.
I suppose the only REAL advantage you get is that the flash devices could be gang programmed more quickly, but if you were running more than a half dozen or so high-speed CD burners, you could crank out CDs as fast as you could take someone's money anyways.
Life is too short to proofread.
Congratulations on being the 1 millionth Slashdotter to completely misunderstand the concept of "fair use."
"Fair use" doesn't mean "I think it's only fair that I get to copy and use this." Fair use is a statutory defense to a charge of copyright infringement that is available primarily to those who use a portion of a copyrighted work (not the entire concert, program, etc.) for educational or journalistic purposes, and is especially effective when that use is non-commercial. Fair use protects your local t.v. newscast when they show you a 30 second clip of the band playing at your local arena, or when you quote some of the lyrics to a song in a review. It does not protect you wanting to make copies of CDs for your friends or taping entire concerts without the permission of the artist.
That's right. Until now you could only get instant recordings of pre-recorded concerts. Now, with our cutting-edge "live concert" technology you can get instant recordings of live concerts.
I think it's time to get a new retarded monkey to write the headlines. This one's busticated.
-Peter
Great so let's see...
Before: I won't buy music unless it's cheap and without DRM.
Now: Oh you got that? But it's mp3. I won't buy music unless it's cheap, without DRM and in FLAC.
Next: Oh you got that? But it's not on a purple Bluetooth drive. I won't buy music unless it's cheap, without DRM, in FLAC and on a purple Bluetooth drive.
Later: Oh you got that too? Um, damit... anybody has a good excuse I can use?
Phish has a system for this, and they have had it going for at least a year now. Plus, you can get it in either mp3 or lossless format (FLAC).
They do not tether DRM either, and still allow for audience to tape the shows with special taper tickets. Those can be freely traded, but the ones Phish provides is an honor system (what? a band that does not assume that their fans are out to rip them off? Someone call the RIAA)
This is already possible for some bands. After going to a Primus show recently (Tour de Fromage). I was able to pay to download the entire show as either flac or mp3 from primuslive.com. Also, for truly free live shows of less popular and often more talented bands at the Live Music Archive over at archive.org.
This may be so, but, it might also make a great souvenir, especially if it had the bands logo on it. Then, you could put the concert on your computer, or wherever else, and still have a handy USB drive/momento. Even if they allow people to use their own drive, there could be those who prefer the "Jon Bon Jovi Still Rocks (he swears) Tour" memorobilia!
It's good to see that people are trying to embrace technology instead of fighting it. It's not a crime to try and make a buck, but lets see some innovation! Let's some value added, and incentive. !
Oddly enough, Metallica, the former poster child of the anti-Napster crowd, has a system like that: www.livemetallica.com.
DRM-free FLAC files can be downloaded with a few days of a concert happening.
"People that quote themselves in their signatures bother me" - athakur999
I was at a PJ show a few years ago, and about halfway through, Eddie started talking between songs. He pointed at a guy toward the front and said something along the lines of, "I just want to point out this motherfucker here. He's had his arm in the air recording the show the whole damn time, and he hasn't had a free arm to put around his girl. Pass that thing up here". The audience passed up the guy's recorder (DAT, Minidisc, whatever), and Eddie takes it and jokes, "This motherfucker thinks he's getting it back [laugh]" He then says something directly into the recorder, off-mike, just for the guy's recorder. Then he puts the recorder down near his feet near some speakers to get a good recording.
I'm sure that this very lucky concertgoer got an unbelievable recording when he got his recorder back, which I'm sure was right after the band spoke with the crippled kids who got to watch the show from ON STAGE.
Not only is PJ probably the best rock band of the 1990's (and 2000's, so far), but they're really great guys.