I went to the R.E.M. concert last night, and while looking at the $30 t-shirts ( ), I wondered why bands don't start selling CDs of the concert you are there to see.

With technology the way it is today, they could have the CDs ready almost immediately after the concert ends. Burning a CD now takes about as long as it does to check out. I know there are countess bootlegs out there, but I know I would pay upwards of $20 for a quality recording.

Now, the one thing I'm not sure about is whether the band would have a legal right to sell such a CD. Or would the record label(s) have to sign off and get their cut?

Anyway, it was just a thought.

Pearl Jam has done this their past two tours. In 2000 and 2003 they made all of their shows available for purchase for under $20. You would get the download link the day after the show and they were in MP3 format and then about a week later you'd receive the show you ordered in the mail.

I don't know of many other bands that do this.

I remember reading an article where this type of thing is being tested now, i.e. a CD of the show being available right after, so it is being worked on.

from pitchforkmedia.com

Instant Bootlegs: The Souvenir Live Album
by Chris Dahlen

Back in the 70s, live albums were monoliths: two, three, even four platters of shelf-denting indulgence, like The Concert for Bangladesh or the Chicago at Carnegie Hall box set. Keith Jarrett played ten albums of piano solos in his Sun Bear Concerts. And nothing could top the gigantic Peter Frampton photo on Comes Alive! as the icon of a zombified end-of-tour cash-in. But if records like that defined the "concert album," today's releases are more like a swarm: from Pearl Jam and Phish, to the onslaught of official Grateful Dead bootlegs, a few bands are releasing every minute of live music in their vaults to the niche audience that can't be sated.

This year, the music industry has taken the next logical step: they've created the souvenir concert album. Simultaneously a bold new step for bootlegs and the audio equivalent of the snapshots they sell you when you get off a rollercoaster, a venue can now sell you a CD of the concert you just saw as you're walking out the door. A team of engineers record the show from start to finish, with no edits, and the second it ends they burn the recording through a tower of CD-R drives. Ten minutes later it's packaged and ready to sell at the merch table-- a perfect, complete record of the gig you just watched, just the way you remember it.

But there's a catch: Instant Live, which launched in May, is owned by Clear Channel Entertainment, one of the largest and most aggressive media companies in America. The owner of six times as many radio stations as its nearest competitor and the owner and/or booker of over 130 venues, Clear Channel has been criticized for anti-competitive and anti-artist practices by the press-- Salon's extensive coverage has set the bar-- and politicans including Senator John McCain. Even the deregulation-happy FCC has scrutinized their business.

So as cool as this technology sounds, music fans will ask: what are they planning to do with it?

For now, the Instant Live team has started small, launching in Clear Channel's home base of Boston and recording at smaller rock clubs-- like the Paradise, where I went to see them record Kay Hanley, former frontwoman of Letters to Cleo. I only heard about the gig by talking to Clear Channel: neither Hanley nor the venue advertised it on their websites, but once you walked in the club you couldn't miss the merch table, with large Instant Live banners and young employees promoting the album they were about to record. As if to demonstrate just how easy it was, they even had a boombox playing a CD that they had just cut during the soundcheck.

Inside the club, they projected logos on either side of the stage-- the "INSTANT LIVE-- Sound Quality: EX+!" logo on the left and "AVAILABLE AT BEST BUY" on the right. (Best Buy has a so-far exclusive deal to distribute the records.) I stood near the stage and took notes on everything that happened during the set-- every joke, cough or bum note that could be compared to the disc, in case someone really was editing it-- and ten minutes after the show I paid $10 for my own copy and took it out to the car to play on the ride home.

Listening to a recording of a show that you've seen, especially one you've just seen, is a strange experience. Instant Live discs are high-quality soundboard recordings, in bare-bones but official-looking packages; but like the best bootlegs, nothing is edited or cut out. The stage talk and other interruptions-- the details that make it "your" show-- catch your ear as much as the music. Of course, you don't get to see Hanley in her schoolgirl outfit, but that just helps you focus on the songs.

Hanley starts the show by introducing her husband and sole bandmate, "USA Mike" Eisenstein, who's on guitar and keys. Playing acoustic guitar, Hanley opens with "Princely Ghetto" from her latest album, and the recording sounds great: it's sharp and crisp like a perfect radio broadcast, "live-sounding" but intimate. You can hear them adjust the mix a couple of times-- a sudden echo opens up and then vanishes-- but Hanley's performance is great, and her high voice sounds more striking when it can peak or soar with no processing to level it out.

The Instant Live engineers didn't edit anything. When Hanley takes almost a minute to tell people to buy t-shirts and CD's, it's all in there. You can listen to Hanley talk to her three-year-old daughter-- halfway through "Satellite" she chirps, "Hey Zoe!"-- and you can almost hear Zoe talk back after the song. You can also hear Hanley make a couple mistakes, like a short coughing fit near the end of "In Clouds". "That's a keeper," she jokes afterwards. But best of all, the songs sound great: you can hear the stripped-down, high-energy pop songs with none of the spontaneity polished out of them.

"Don't forget to buy the live CD!" she says at the end of the live CD, and then it abruptly cuts off.

A week later, I spoke with the project director for Instant Live, Steve Simon, a Clear Channel Executive Vice-President who has run the program since its inception. Simon-- whose personal favorite live record is the Grateful Dead's Skull and Roses set, from '71-- has worked with local acts for the seven albums they've released so far, including Hybrasil and Machinery Hall. He's looked for bands that are "meaingful to our venue" and can bring a fanbase, and for now, he's "not putting a lot of energy into artists that already have exclusive recording contracts."

Although Instant Live has started with a handful of clubs, Simon emphasizes that with the same rig they could do a show in Boston one night and New York the next. "The equipment is fully transportable. It can be transported more or less in the back of a Jeep Cherokee." The only limits are on the business side. At this stage, Simon won't state a specific revenue or strategy goal for the project, but one of the general goals is to "enhance our core business." It's not hard to speculate that they could equip it in their venues and then promote the product on their radio stations; if a band uses Clear Channel as a promoter, Instant Live could be another line-item in the contract.

Simon's at ease with the spontaneous nature of the albums-- that Clear Channel is releasing a product it has no time to review. For example, in spite of the licensing issues, Simon doesn't discourage artists from playing covers. "I think that's part of what makes the live concert so special, is to get the band on that night when they do a different version of somebody else's song... There are things that we have to do to address that, but we don't attempt to limit that at all."

Given that it's rock and roll, there's also a risk that an artist-- in a Replacements-like case of career suicide-- could record comments against Clear Channel or one of its properties. Simon allows that "there are all sorts of conceivable ways that one might deal with that," but he didn't consider it likely: "If an artist goes through the paces of doing this with us, they're doing it because they want to sell discs. They're doing it because we have a relationship with them, or have created a relationship... By the time you've been through all that I don't think there's much of a concern that the band's going to then get up there and call you names."

Kay Hanley, for one, has had a long relationship with the program: she was a "guinea pig" for an early pilot last fall, in spite of the fact that until recently, she hated live recording. "I think I always hated it because something gets lost when you tape a live show. When you're at the show everything's in the moment, and things like pitch problems and a guitar screw-up here and there don't mean so much... and when you listen back to it later, it just sounds like shit.

"[Instant Live] came along at a time when I was doing a more stripped-down thing. So my voice naturally sounds better because I'm not screaming over loud guitars and smashing drums. And also, you know, it's just time to get over it." Hanley says the Paradise album sounds "awesome," and she's excited about the sales: she sold sixty copies at the venue, and her contract gives her half of the $10 sale price.

But as a veteran of the music biz, Hanley's conscious of the broader business issues. "I'm psyched about it for myself. But I will understand when people start to complain... As this technology becomes more popular-- as more and more people get involved with Clear Channel and take advantage of this technology-- I hope that the artist continues to reap the financial benefits." As she tactfully puts it, "Artists have learned in the past that these big corporations don't necessarily have their best interests at heart."

This technology could give Clear Channel a new niche to control, or it could level the field. The actual equipment is easy to set up: you could put together a similar rig for a few thousand dollars-- not much money for a good-sized club or a mid-level touring band. And there are other companies testing the water, including DiscLive, who just cut a three-disc recording of Jefferson Starship. However, if the venues take the lead, an artist could have as little control over the process as they do over the beer and nachos at the concession stand.

Whoever's in charge, fans will get an onslaught of new product that could someday glut their carefully curated record collections. And for all the great records that could come from these programs, we risk downgrading the live album from an event of its own to just another snapshot. I'm worried that someday I'll walk out of the best show I've ever seen, drop ten dollars on a souvenir album because it's there, and a month later play it for my friends-- and suddenly the whole show will be lost; we'll just sort of look at each other and say, "What was the big deal?"

Peter Gabriel is selling 2 disc sets of each of his shows from his summer tour here. They were available a couple of weeks after each show. I didn't go to any of the shows, but I'm thinking of picking up a copy of one of them.

The Who did the same thing.

www.eelpie.com

Long live Pearl Jam.

Getting CDs immediately as you walk out of a concert is good for the impulse merchandise tent buyer, but that's about it. What's wrong with this system is that the CDs aren't mixed properly.. what sounds good through the board in the house often won't sound spectacular in a smaller environment (your car, room, etc).

I believe Pearl Jam's shows are remastered for CD. Phish's SHN downloading system is straight off of the board. Peter Gabriel's shows are remastered.

On a related topic, I'm a DMB whore and have hundreds of audience recorded concerts. I would rather listen to an audience recording over an improperly mixed "official" concert CD. You might be surprised at the quality of recordings that are coming out of the audience.. many of them sound just as good as properly mixed live CDs.

I've always wondered why most artists do not sell their studio CDs at their concerts, or at the very least their most recent CD. I've only seen it done at classical music concerts or shows by largely unknown acts, usually the ones without major record deals.

It seems like a no-brainer to have CDs available for impulse buys and to help increase their fan-base. Even an overpriced $20 CD would look like a good deal next to the $30 t-shirts!

Cerulean, it's mainly because if you shelled out the hig price to go to the show, chances are you already have the studio cd.

Most bands do this. Green day, Tori amos, radiohead all do this.

Almost every show that I can think of have had CDs sold at the merch booth. I don't go to arena or amphitheater shows, though, so maybe that's the difference.

I went to see Joseph Arthur at the Troubadour earlier this year and he bootlegged his own show. He sold them about a half hour after the show. It was "free" with purchase of his studio album "Redemption's Son". To me that's the best idea for distributing live shows!

I like the idea, but sadly it's Clear Channel that's trying to promote it, and they're basically threatening artists by saying "go along with this or else you won't be playing at venues we control."

My friend bought one of these concert CD's at a Billy Idol concert we went to a couple of weeks ago (Richmond, VA). The CDs sound awesome! I like the option of being able to buy a concert that you attended. The 2 CD set was $20 but if it is an excellent show, then I think it is worth every penny. I know there are many other concerts I went to where I wished I could have bought a CD. Hopefully this will become the norm.

Long live tapers and generous taping policies.

I'd rather have the option of getting a quality audience recording of any show that someone taped, with one or two official live releases from the band a year. I love the quality of an official soundboard, but there's something special about being able to hear a show you went to as you heard it.

Long live DMB.