You attend an opera or concert that catches fire, and you want to hold
on to the experience, repeat it, *have* it.

How fortuitous then that as you leave, you can buy a CD of the event you
have just heard.

Impossible?  Not at all.  The technology is there, along with demand and
the motivation for supply ($$$) - so, surely, it's just a matter of time.

Apparently, instant gratification of CD craving is already available at
some rock concerts.  I am still trying to verify this, but I've seen
reports of the Dave Matthews Band and Pearl Jam offering "official
bootlegs." An excerpt from a report, whose veracity I cannot confirm.

   On his way out of a recent Moe show in Knoxville, Tennessee,
   James Malone stopped at a concession stand for a souvenir.
   He didn't buy a concert T-shirt for fifteen dollars or a
   poster for ten. He paid twenty dollars for a CD set that
   contained the entire three-hour concert he'd just seen. And
   he had to wait only five minutes. "It's always fun listening
   to where you've been," the thirty-three-year-old computer
   technician says. "You can't remember a show after you have a
   few drinks, or you walk to the bathroom and you miss a nice
   little riff."

   Malone was one of 175 fans who bought the show on CD that
   night -- and he later spent another $320 on recordings of
   other nights from the same tour.  Moe have grossed approximately
   $38,500 from the tour's eleven shows so far (there are
   twenty-eight shows in total), half of which goes to Clear
   Channel Entertainment.  The CDs are part of Clear Channel's
   new Instant Live program, which has produced live recordings
   for Moe, the Allman Brothers Band and thirteen other acts --
   making them all available within minutes of the shows' end.
   In a time of declining record sales and industry layoffs,
   many bands and managers see the growing market for "official
   bootleg" recordings as a trend that will bring new profits
   and provide a great service for fans.  "It's the future of
   the touring merchandise business," Eagles manager Irving Azoff
   said recently.

   Aside from Clear Channel's Instant Live program, many
   enterprising bands are producing their own live CDs to sell
   to fans on their Web sites and in stores.  The trend is going
   big: Artists ranging from the Dead and Peter Gabriel to Duran
   Duran, Jimmy Buffett and Incubus are getting into the live-CD
   business.

   The live-CD boom began with Pearl Jam's pioneering series of
   seventy-two CDs that documented every show from their 2000
   tour.  String Cheese Incident and other jam bands followed.
   Then last year, through startup the Music.com, the Who jumped
   on the idea and wound up grossing $1.2 million on live CDs
   from their 2002 tour.  Early this year, Phish made every 2003
   show available -- within forty-eight hours -- on livephish.com;
   the band has sold more than 150,000 of the recordings and
   earned more than $2 million.

On the classical front, there is a deadly rigidity, which (in San
Francisco and elsewhere) prevents broadcasts, and virtually forces
"unofficial bootleg," costing companies money and the chance to make
the genre more popular.  How familiar this is from the last century -
NFL bigwigs screaming that televising football will bankrupt them!

Perhaps worst of all, the current private/illegal recording environment
does great damage to the performing artists (who, supposedly, are protected
by management) - forcing a uniformly inferior quality on everything that
will preserve the memory of performances.

Laments a fellow music lover: "With few exceptions, recordings from
the hall are vastly inferior to the house tapes...  and those poor audio
recordings *will* circulate.  The house cannot stop them.  They will not
do justice to orchestra or stage, but that's how people who were not
there will know the performance.

"The only people who benefit from the house's unwillingness/inability
to release the recordings are the pirates.  I know that it's not trivial
to include permissions even in new contracts, but something needs to be
done.  The ostrich does not stick his head in the sand; there isn't room
when the whole desert is full of starving musical organizations with
their derrieres reaching for the stars."

Time to catch up with Pearl Jam?

Janos Gereben/SF
www.sfcv.org
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