One of the concerts I captured in the 90's, lives on as a bootleg which I often see around the scene of this one particularly great live electronic dance band, whose punters have created true value out of the hour and a half of live concert input I managed to record, standing right there front stage and center, with the band looking right at me.
It was a hilarious experience - I expected to get booted out pretty fast, so I held my ground as still as I could, DAT-tape rolling by, shotgun mike held in front of me like it was just normal, as if I belonged there.
The lead singer caught my eye and gave me a wide grin. I survived the concert, it was awesome, but boy was I relieved to have made it home with that DAT - which I of course, proceeded to digitize with my brand new spdf/io ..
The next year the band (who are big and famous, btw) were in the same city and I happened to be around, I got invited backstage to meet the band, participate in a bit of nerdery regarding their live setup and gear and so on, and talk about that recording I'd made.
I'd put it out as a pure bootleg, no questions asked.
Turns out they'd heard it and enjoyed it and came to appreciate the nature of their bootleggers, as avid fans who gave the band themselves something extra to think about in what was then, a burgeoning digital/online universe about to explode.
So, seeing it around, almost 30 years now .. here and there, again and again .. is quite hilarious. Youtube often recommends it to me in my playlist, its just there.
And at a certain spot in the recording, I tell my mate to stop standing so close to me (he was blocking the shottie), and prepare for my ass getting bounced - which never happened, thankfully.
So yeah, I just wanna say, if you personally have the desire to be a recordist, and have a pure purpose in it, I'd say just freakin' go for it.
Record All The Things.
Its good for the Artists, yo. And also their fans. (Its how we get rid of the managers, cough cough..)
However, I do notice that for more uncommon music, the record industry sort it just looks the other way. For example Eminem has tons of really old music on YouTube that I’m sure his lawyers could figure out how to get taken down. But it just stays up.
I would really like music copyright to change within my lifetime. It should realistically be 30 years from first release, and after that it should go straight to the public domain. By then everyone’s made their money. Even Elvis won’t be public domain until like 2050 or 2060. I don’t really think he needs the money right now.
Will there be convenient parking?
Do they have adequate power?
Is the stage big enough?
Do we need to book sound?
Is there a weather contingency?
Where can we sleep?
What time is load in?
What time is sound check?
What form of payment?
How will they be advertising?
Who do we give promotional materials to?
Etc etc. Having someone take care of all this stuff allows us to focus on practicing and recording (which has another long list of questions that need to be addressed).
Not to mention networking and venue access. Put all that stuff together and it's a full time job that artists are poorly equipped to handle.
Or artists that have seen the merit in tolerating it/somewhat encouraging it. I'm a pretty hardcore Nine Inch Nails fan (seen >30 shows).
NINLive.com is a fantastic (unofficial) archive for our community. Close to 2k individual recordings, about 3/4 of all shows they've ever played have at least one recording.
NIN's camp is fully aware, the guy who runs the site has gotten invited to meet the band before. (And NIN has tossed unedited pro-shot tour footage to the fans before to play with, as well as things like directly linking to a fan-compiled concert film for another tour on their own home page).
The process of actually getting in, post-invite, was a bit of a weird experience: Waiting around at the front of the venue, meeting some of his PR folks, walking all the way around the outside to go in the back door to get escorted in. At one point we were given some armbands so we could do what we wanted as if we were regular concert-goers and they turned us loose.
Anyway, as we were walking around that huge place and chatting, one of them (Marcus?) asked me how I got interested in Nine Inch Nails.
And the first thing that came that came out of my mouth was "It is entirely possible that I banned Trent Reznor from IRC 30 years ago."
The response was immediate: "Never tell him that."
Anyhow, the crew that I met were all a bunch of great folks. Wonderful positivity, fun to talk to. 10/10.
---
(Now, you might be wondering why I banned Trent from #nin. That's easy: We banned everyone in that channel who said they were Trent Reznor. There's only one Trent, and these imposters showed up all the time so we did the right thing and got rid of them.
Except... I read an interview with him way back then, where he was asked specifically about IRC. His response was something like "Yeah, I tried IRC once and they banned me right away. Those guys are a bunch of dicks."
Whoops.)
The instrumental album "Ghosts I-IV" was released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license, and the music went everywhere - and you can draw a line directly from that choice to the Oscar for the score for The Social Network.
Concert photos, wallpapers, and other photos are still up on Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/nineinchnails/albums
And the NIN camp utilized Vimeo alongside YouTube: https://vimeo.com/ninofficial
Rumor has it that Trent Reznor himself uploaded material to The Pirate Bay, because he didn't like the audio quality of the rips that were already floating around. There are three compilations that appeared, with custom artwork, including at least one exclusive version of a track that hasn't appeared anywhere else.
(p.s. wot up volk)
https://antsmarching.org/ forum has hundreds, maybe thousands of show recordings. Often multiple for each night. They make their own official Soundboard releases that fans still purchase, but their stewardship of fan audio capture is commendable.
Really, I'm fine with it.
Musicians make money with their gigs, and that is how it should be.
Always throw a coin at live musicians, folks. They deserve it.
Financialization ? Productize, promote, push ?
Many bands (like GD and Phish) specifically note in their rider that venues must allow and provide space for tapers to bring their rigs in.
A sibling comment in this thread pointed out my project Relisten[0], which now has over 4,000 bands who have given explicit permission for people to tape, record, and share their concerts non-commercially. We've been operating our FOSS platform for 12 years, and most of the audio is hosted by Archive.org. I can't tell you how many bands have begged us to add them to our platform.
[0] https://relisten.net (https://github.com/RelistenNet)
(The 4,000 number will be coming to web soon - it's available today on our mobile apps)
Assuming it’s a band most have heard of I was leaning toward Daft Punk, but maybe the Prodigy?
Here you go:
I got VERY good at quickly rewinding a film roll and slipping it in the hands of a nearby friend in case security spotted me and wanted to nick my film. Always had a handful of empty film rolls to give up (seemingly reluctantly)
Worst scare I had was when taping Ray Charles at a jazz festival in Norway c.2000, methinks. Well into the show, he exclaims that some ass is taping his show, and he's not too happy about it. Starts explaining he's not going to play on until he's got that tape in his hands!
I glance around, rather nervously, but noone is heading for me - so I just keep recording, hoping that someone else is on the hook. Lo and behold, moments later a stage hand comes on stage with what appeared to be a broadcast video tape, giving it to a triumphant Ray Charles who sits down and starts playing again. Phew!
Unless you use a crappy smartphone with a bright annoying screen ..
You'll get it.
Just do it.
I was a teenager at the last show I was at, and I always envied thise guys.
I used to buy VHS tapes of live Phish recordings from the person at the show. VHS because of the fidelity I guess.
Edit: or Erasure?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXBEsPy1SSo
Very good guess, btw.
More generally someone on the buying/risk side of a transaction.
Please, get someone who knows about usability or building web UIs to help you!
2. https://dlr2008.wordpress.com/2014/06/15/on-public-access-to...
3. https://relisten.net/grateful-dead
Clearly this tape stash is worthy of similar treatment. Also of note for live music fans and collectors: Legendary Long Island Radio Station WLIR Live Show Archives:
https://www.kqed.org/arts/13979518/sacramento-music-archive-...
Go out and support your local live music scene.
I still love when one of my live bootlegs of Faith No More comes on with them doing (sometimes mocking) parodies of popular music (their rendition of Nothing Compares to You by Sinead OConnor has been in my head as I type this). When I got to see them in 2010 (I think) they were true to form and played a bunch of short (reinterpretations) covers and it was one of the best aspects of the show. And I still have a Mr Bungle bootleg with them covering Existential Blues by Tom "T-Bone" Stankus (I always thought it was Doctor Demento's Wizard of Oz until just now when I looked it up).
How would you even know about these awesome gems without bootlegs or access to see all their live shows? YouTube is less likely to capture an entire show than a clip, whereas the bootlegs were typically the full show. There are probably areas of the internet where this stuff gets shared and traded, but having it in my local music shop meant everyone had access without requiring special knowledge.
I just did two searches, one Google and one Kagi, and neither turned up the FNM Nothing Compares to You. Who knows how many copies of it exist in the world. If my music library gets nuked, who will even know about it? I think I'm gonna start uploading my bootleg recordings of live shows to IA.
Same in my town. For a 14 yo kid, that was a lot.
Now that I think more about it, I must have got the track from a P2P service / network. But I had a bajillion Nirvana bootlegs when I was an adolescent. Thinking of the misnaming phenomenon, the hidden track (from Nevermind) was alternately named either "I Hate Myself and I Want to Die" or "I Love Myself and I Want to Live" on those live performances (after Cobain's suicide). 1990s and no or limited internet, so it was whatever someone decided.
Thanks for surfacing the track so readers can hear it! It's one of my favorites.
I found an archive of the full set that includes the Nothing Compares 2 U track. Seems that they opened the gig with the song [0]. There's a neat story in the link about the show and how this bootleg got around.
Mr.Bungle
Date: 1990-05-27
Venue: (BBurnett) @The Full Moon Saloon, San Francisco, CA
Recorded By: Sean Lyons
Source: Sony Stereo Clip-On Mic > Cassette Walkman > audience master cassette > Tascam 3-head Professional Cassette Deck Model 130 > Tascam DA40 > Tascam CDRW5000 > Samplitude Professional 7.11
EDIT: You weren't kidding. I can't find a cover of it. Please! Share it!
There was a good bbc show of theirs floating around on YouTube. The music is so intense that I feel these quieter pieces give one a chance to catch one’s breath.
Midnight Cowboy was on both StMLt and Angel Dust (which I wasn't allowed to own because of the Explicit Lyrics sticker at first. My father and mother argued about that. Thanks Dad!) What a great track for slowing down. The band wasn't just about heavy and dark tones, they also appreciated and could produce beautiful music. The fulness of the song really overwhelms me when the whole band kicks in.
I once bought a VHS recording of a Lemonheads gig after seeing them at the Glastonbury festival, guess it must have been around 1993, and in visual terms it was absolutely unwatchable - the camera wasn't still for a second - but probably pretty representative of what it was like to be there.
Etree (https://www.etree.org/ ) is the longest running torrent site for tapes. It looks like only about 5% of the hundred thousand torrents have any seeders at all. Not sure how reliable requesting a seed is. I’d expect long tail stuff to get “effectively lost”. Versus IA whose purpose and funding is preservation, in addition to sharing.
Thus they are encouraging amateur third parties to pick up some of the archival slack, that style of torrent could outlive IA in case anything happened to them, and it reduces some of their bandwidth costs
The few bands that didn't care or even encouraged it reaped the benefits. I was a huge Ween fan in the 90s and bootlegged a show of theirs myself. Camera and recording devices were allowed and the result was a tremendous amount of live content available online. For some bands this might not matter, but they rarely played the same set list twice and often played songs differently from show to show. In the early internet days, there was more ween content online than you could ever hope to listen to.
They still put a lot of effort sometimes. I saw Dave Chapelle in NYC and they made us put our phones in these pouches which were unsealed on exiting the show.
I was a member of a few tape sharing communities at the turn of the millennium and spent those years digitizing scores of board and bootleg live recordings (APE or FLAC... the great debate). We'd trade our strategies for getting gear into shows, who was working door and board and was cool with what, stories of getting caught. When recorders got small enough, we started sneaking MiniDisc players into venues with microphones down our sleeves for stereo. I've still got a few stacks of those.
Leading up to that, at the dawn of LAME, I was doing the same over on IRC. Everyone with an fserve had a few tracks or albums of their favorite bands, tons local with no other distribution, and you could always message them for more info. There was a lot of love, and I found a lot of great people across the world that way.
When the RIAA crackdowns started, I archived as much as I could but lost everything in the mid-2000s when a Windows upgrade overwrote my external storage. The irony that hundreds of gigs (of both kids) would have survived if I'd put them on tape hasn't eluded me.
11 chapters about DIY / Punk / Hardcore bands of the 1980s underground scene.
(The audiobook in particular is fun as it's read by musicians influenced by the artists in their respective chapters)
I also think there's a lot to learn from the book about DIY for any startup or community organizer.
Lastly, if you read and you want to learn more about 'The Replacements', 'Trouble Boys', Bob Mehr, is a terrific read.
The parallels with being in a band and a startup are real. Azerrad says many times in the book that what these bands were doing was entrepreneurial.
We landed an update on mobile last week that brought all 4,000 artists with a "collection" onto Relisten. That'll be coming to the web and sonos shortly as well.
We've been discussing the Aadam Jacob's collection with the archivists for some time. It comes with its own unique UX[0] and data constraints so we've been iterating on that and waiting for a critical mass of uploads before tackling it. We're getting closer though.
I agree with most of the sentiment in these comments. Archive and share non-comercially all the things!
[0] it's not "one" artist so it requires some custom UI, it should be unified through a single Aadam Jacob's collection, and it has a unique data path/structure on Archive.org relative to other collections
The Mark, Tom, and Travis show was always a blast to listen to with my friends.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mark,_Tom,_and_Travis_Show...!)
I also liked sharing certain tracks with my friends when they came over...
I'm wondering though is there any decentralized IPFS or P2P Archive of the entire archive that can be helped with for preservation ?
https://www.wired.com/story/the-internets-most-powerful-arch...
LOCKSS is a decentralized strategy for preservation which includes archival copies at remote sites. It has been in use for a very long time. I feel like preservation via IPFS would introduce quite a bit of risk to the goal.
From a 2016 blog post:
"Do you do backups too, for example to guard against corrupt data getting mirrored across both copies, or accidental deletion?"
John Gonzalez, the author and IA infrastructure lead, replied:
"We have done experiments to confirm that we can back up large portions of our corpus... but this is not a regular practice for us at this time."
https://blog.archive.org/2016/10/25/20000-hard-drives-on-a-m...
LOCKSS looks interesting but it seems like it's exclusively for libraries.
Also there was a shop in Temple Bar Dublin that seemed to specialise in selling bootlegs. They were really expensive, but really good, clearly taken from the sound desk.
Anachronistic?
It seems like a complicated way of saying "the tapes were digitized".
I think the author meant "old-fashioned" or "obsolete". Though using a cassette deck to read cassettes, geez, what else are you going to do? Build your own using an Arduino?
https://apnews.com/article/aadam-jacobs-collection-concerts-...
I was pleased to find some "They Might Be Giants" in the archive.
My mindset was: They already did most of the work, just exporting the audio (that already exists!) would give them extra income. Could be a subscription service, or pay per album, or even for free (it's a marketing channel).
Some bands don't want their live recording out there (multiple reasons: from errors during the live show, or to keep the experience exclusive, or they think some people won't want to go to see them live if they already can listen to it). There is also the aspect of "If we release it for free or in the platform, we can't never make an actual live recording album", which could make some sense.
For years I dreamt about this "Netflix for unreleased live concerts" platform but I couldn't reach anything. Maybe I am really bad seller, and I just needed help from someone with more experience with the industry.
I ended up doing this unofficially for my faovurite artist, with the help of friends and collectors, uploading bootlegs (sometimes amateur recordings, sometimes board sound recording), and catalogued so you can search for all the plays of a particular song, or an album, how many times this song was played, if there was a guest, filter by country, city, year, etc, etc.
Which is not to say no concert should ever be recorded, but I could understand why it wouldn’t be a priority for some artists.
Directly exporting the audio straight from the mixer would not necessarily produce quality recordings because the audio there is tuned for the purposes of sound reinforcement. To properly record a live concert requires an entirely separate setup with their own microphones and then some direct output from the mixer on a per channel basis to allow for post-production editing.
And a lot of people don't care about that! Lots of people are happy with the quality you'd get straight from a cell phone microphone.
But the people on stage and the people in the industry ... they're the ones actually involved in producing the sound, and many care very deeply about the quality that gets recorded and then shared. That's not to say that all musicians are like that, but many are!
https://archive.org/details/KingGizzardAndTheLizardWizard
Plenty of other artists have free concert archives at https://archive.org/details/etree
Then again, the Dead were also pioneers of permitting and encouraging the bootleg scene.
(See my comment upthread about Fugazi and the unexpected encounter with Ian MacKaye after I stumbled upon an obscure YouTube recording)
I saw David Byrne last week, during checkout for the ticket I would probably have paid an extra $10 to get access to the recording of that show.
But yeah, jam bands have really embraced this more than any other category of artist - it's quite common even among low-mid tier jam bands that every single show ends up on Nugs. These bands are often pretty friendly to recordists too (a recent show I was at has two recordings on the IA as well as the Nugs version. Everyone's happy!)
Right after the show, you could buy fancy looking USB sticks, designed with unique elements of the artists, pre-loaded with the recording of the set you had just heard.
I still have a guitar-shaped USB stick from a Mark Knopfler show at a small venue in a tiny town in southern Germany. Honestly, it’s a far better souvenir than any picture I could have taken.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20150205231438/http://www.bleeck...
This has been done. Peter Gabriel, for example, did this on one of his tours (I think Back to Front, but I’m too lazy to dig it up). The California Guitar Trio also experimented with it.
I’m guessing the fact that it’s not a widespread practice is that the return on investment (and we’re talking strictly the additional costs beyond simply recording the show) didn’t justify the effort.
Yeah, I've been to low double-figure gigs[0] where they were selling soundboard CDs shortly after the gig. If I'm not mistaken, a bunch of them were being done by the same company (but an internet search is unproductive.)
[0] In London, I want to say late 2000s, early 2010s?
This is like all of the great shows I couldn't go to in my childhood. Incredible.
Often before a performance recorded music is played and captured in the audience recordings.
Would it be possible to train a model on an archive of these concert audience recordings of studio recordings paired with the original studio recordings to develop a system to “clean up” audience recordings?
Elf Power Live at Lounge Ax 1998-04-25 https://archive.org/details/ajc01382_elf-power-1998-04-25
Fountains Of Wayne Live at The Vic Theatre 2003-11-19 https://archive.org/details/ajc00691_fountains-of-wayne-2003...
Fugazi Live at State Theatre on 1991-08-06 https://archive.org/details/ajc02237_fugazi1991-08-06.ajcpro...
Godspeed You! Black Emperor Live at Lounge Ax on 1999-09-16 https://archive.org/details/ajc02676_gybe1999-09-16.ajcproje...
Iron & Wine Live at Abbey Pub 2004-07-02 (Late show) https://archive.org/details/ajc01329_iron-wine-2004-07-02.la...
Josh Rouse Live at Schubas Tavern 2004-04-26 https://archive.org/details/ajc01208_josh-rouse-2004-04-26
Midnight Oil Live at Cabaret Metro 1988-04-30 https://archive.org/details/ajc02792_midnightoil1988-04-30
Neutral Milk Hotel Live at Lounge Ax 1997-05-01 https://archive.org/details/ajc00789_neutralmilkhotel1997-05...
OK Go Live at Belmont-Sheffield Music Festival 2003-05-31 https://archive.org/details/ajc01120_ok-go-2003-05-31
Pavement Live at Lounge Ax 1992-06-12 https://archive.org/details/ajc00811_pavement1992-06-12
Polyphonic Spree Live at Metro on 2003-10-07 https://archive.org/details/ajc01050-PolyphonicSpree2003-10-...
Ratatat Live at Abbey Pub 2004-05-14 https://archive.org/details/ajc01220_ratatat-2004-05-14
Rogue Wave Live at Schubas Tavern on 2005-01-30 https://archive.org/details/ajc01227_roguewave2005-01-30.ajc...
Super Furry Animals Live at Abbey Pub 2002-04-19 https://archive.org/details/ajc01144_super-furry-animals-200...
The Decemberists Live at Intonation Fest on 2005-07-17 https://archive.org/details/ajc00642_decemberists2005-07-17....
The Folk Implosion Live at Schubas Tavern 2000-02-29 (Late show) https://archive.org/details/ajc00963_folk_implosion_2000-02-...
The Shins Live at Schubas Tavern 2001-08-24 https://archive.org/details/ajc01131_the_shins_2001-08-24
0: https://www.discogs.com/master/1664187-The-National-Juicy-So...
I think this is the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdOITpaQvZI "This is a part from autobiographical film Neil made in 1972."
I found the video fascinating and thinking about how and who made these bootlegs is a fascinating mystery to me. It would have to someone in the industry with lots of contacts to get it made and distributed.
I think what the author is getting at is when loops are obviosuly "felt" and feel canned.
Strategy games typically have obvious, tight loops. Turn-based games are loop-driven by definition. And so on. This is fine.
But single player games, single player RPGs, etc, can suffer if the loop is really tight and obvious. Early on, you feel "oh, i get it. it's going to be 40 more hours of THIS". Novelty wears off if the loop doesn't really change or evolve. Whereas in turn-based games or strategy-based games, the loop itself IS the game because it progresses as the game state evolves. Nobody complains about the game-loop of chess because that's the game - if you don't like the loop, you don't like the game and the convo ends there, is what is is. But a single-player adventure game, for example, has to do a lot of other stuff right to keep a player incentivized to keep playing the "loop".
Best example would be BG3, where theres clearly a loop - but its massive. Theres a LOT of variation and events between leaving camp and returning later that night. So each "loop" rarely feels samey.
I think the issue is when gameplay loops become transparent and predictable rather than maintaining novelty. A LOT of games suffer for this - the type of game you agree is good, you enjoy it, but put it down after 12 hours for some reason. It's bc of this. The human brain seeks novelty.
"Don't download this song (Don't do it, no, no) Even Lars Ulrich knows it's wrong (You can just ask him)"
(Just being snarky btw lol)
I've always wondered if that was available somewhere.
if your into providing music, dont default to a live version.
some live recordings are good, you can actually hear the music, and the crowd is only noticble between songs.
im thinking that an online archive of live concerts will only steepen this trend.
im just going back to all my mp3 media more often nowadays [bcz i actually bought it mp3 versions, decades ago when you still could]
that way i can hear music, instead of a bunch of people screaming over the music.
now heres somthing else, maybe you remember that concert, you were there, you love hearing you and friends at the concert, maybe people who no longer live are still there. jimmy dean, rock on,
Play from: 'Webamp'
This is what the internet is for.
THANK YOU.
Last year I casually searched YouTube for some shows I had attended in my youth and this one popped up, recorded by a high school classmate who happened to be there, filming from the side from a balcony or rope rack used by stagehands.
I then went to the Fugazi Live Series archive to see if there was better quality audio (the band recorded most of their shows from the 1980s through the early 2000s, and posted almost all of them in the archive). That October 1989 concert was in the database (https://dischord.com/fugazi_live_series/cambridge-ma-usa-100...), and there were some comments by others who attended, but there was no supporting media other than a single photograph.
So I emailed the address on the website:
Hi, regarding this show someone created a video recording from which the audio can probably be extracted. It's on YouTube here:
https://youtu.be/0XS3QD2cddo?si=1TM9PglNv-Rlr98w
I was at the show but not near the stage. It was a memorable show for me and many others according to the description on the official Fugazi archive.
The uploader of the video (my high school classmate, who I believe was a member of the FUs at some point) says:
"In 1989, I went to the First Congregational Church, In Harvard Sq. Cambridge Massachusetts, in hopes of getting into this Fugazi show. Unfortunately, the promoter pre-sold the tickets to people he knew. Thus there was a large crowd of people trying to get in without tickets. Fortunately for me, I had been friends with him before, and he let my girlfriend and I in. Once inside, I asked Guy if I could videotape the show, he told me to go ahead... as long as I sent a copy of the video to Dischord Records... I never did... I just wasn't responsible enough in those days to bother... anyway, here it is, the full show, in all it's faded and low resolution glory... so go ahead, enjoy, and share."
To my surprise, Ian MacKaye responded! While he could extract the audio from YouTube, he wanted to know if I could get in touch with my high school classmate who might still have the original tapes which would have better quality. I did, and my classmate actually got the tapes (from his old girlfriend, who had them in a box in her basement) and shipped them off to Ian. At some point they will be properly digitized and put on the Fugazi archive.
I had a long interview with Ian about archiving which I hope to post on my blog later this summer. To make a long story short, he's amassed a huge collection of materials from Fugazi and his previous bands (most notably Minor Threat) which includes concert audio, studio audio, video, photos, concert flyers, and every piece of fan mail they received at Dischord House from the 1980s to the present day.
He's very systematic about organizing the archives, thanks to interactions with trained archivists including several working for the federal government (he's based in Washington DC).
Minor Threat was before my time, but I've seen Fugazi and The Evens a few times. Ian always puts on a great show. He seems like a really thoughtful, detail oriented guy. I'm not surprised that he keeps organized archives or that he found the time to respond.
https://easygenie.org/search?q=media&options%5Bprefix%5D=las...
These are dangerous words to use for an archive site for material still protected under copyright.