[lokar]

Tangent idea: musicians should record every live show, and then put it on a streaming service, only for people who bought tickets to the show (possibly for an extra small fee on the ticket). Extra revenue for the artist, and a cool benefit for the fan (the liver performance you attended).

[101008]

I love going to concerts and I tried pitching this to producers, bands, etc. They just don't care unfortunately.

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.

[pimlottc]

There is also the legitimate view that a concert is a physical, ephemeral experience shared by the people in the room on the night. That is it fleeting is part of its beauty, in the same manner as live theater.

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.

[adamsilkey]

I think it's a little more nuanced than "bands/producers don't care" and a bit more complex than "exporting the audio (that already exists!)".

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!

[buildsjets]

King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard (yes really) do this, but not just for people who buy tickets to the show. They have 444 concerts up on Archive.org for free to all.

https://archive.org/details/KingGizzardAndTheLizardWizard

Plenty of other artists have free concert archives at https://archive.org/details/etree

[soneil]

Sigur Ros have a surprising number of shows on their ftp, which is delightfully retro.

[kanemcgrath]

since they have been doing orchestral performances, getting to hear the orchestral versions of their old songs has been amazing.

[FatherOfCurses]

I wonder if a band could put together a live stream concert published to a private stream sent to a movie theater. A bunch of fans of the band could get together and have the concert experience with fellow fans but not have to pay as much as an in-person concert. Movie theaters would have another way to get people in the door.

[itintheory]

This definitely happens. Last time Dead & Company came to town, it was simulcast in the local movie theater. Tickets to the show were only available on a raffle basis since the venue didn't hold nearly enough people.

Then again, the Dead were also pioneers of permitting and encouraging the bootleg scene.

[Thlom]

There was a push in the cinema industry a few years back to get more into live events, concerts and stuff like that, but seems like it didn't really take off like they wanted.

[petetnt]

Fugazi released almost 900 shows on CD in the early 2000’s, costing 5 bucks a piece. Some of them are available on their Bandcamp page these days too https://fugazi.bandcamp.com/.

[ilamont]

Not only that, you can listen to many of them for free from the Fugazi online concert archive: https://dischord.com/fugazi_live_series

(See my comment upthread about Fugazi and the unexpected encounter with Ian MacKaye after I stumbled upon an obscure YouTube recording)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47769059

[ClifReeder]

This is very much a among jam bands - see https://www.nugs.net/

[lokar]

That looks like just a subscription thing, right?

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.

[tclancy]

Mike Doughty used to sell burned CDs of the show at the merch table (afterwards in case anyone was worried he was using some Is Chicago, Is Not Chicago technique to violate the space time continuum) back in the aughts.

[epiccoleman]

It's not just a subscription thing, you can purchase individual shows ala bandcamp too.

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!)

[hardtke]

Phish gives people a code that lets them access the show they attend on livephish.com without a subscription. You can subscribe and get access to all of the shows. I think livephish.com is run by and/or shares the same platform as nugs.net but it's a different subscription.

[block_dagger]

Try https://phish.in

[lordfosco]

There was a German startup called Bleecker Street [1] about a decade ago that did exactly that. They toured with artists like Chris Rea, Simple Minds, and Mark Knopfler, tapping directly into the FOH desk at each venue. They would mix the audio live, even adding the ambient noise of the crowd to capture the live feeling.

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...

[natios]

why not have it accessible to everyone so collectors can have a field day with it!

[dewey]

Are you working for free too?

[xd1936]

Available for everyone to purchase*, not just the local venue ticket holders.

[lokar]

I think (I could be wrong), that relatively few people would value the recordings from every show on a tour. But, many more people would value somewhat exclusive access to the recording for a show they attended in person.

[maweaver]

As someone else mentioned above, with jam bands each performance is unique, and people definitely value getting access to every show. For bands repeating the same set as identically as possible on a tour, not sure how much it matters which performance you listen to. Although some people might be into it, for the "I was there" novelty factor.

[dhosek]

Nihil sub sola novum est.

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.

[zimpenfish]

> This has been done.

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?

[dhosek]

I just stumbled across the fact that apparently Bruce Springsteen has an active subscription service allowing people to listen to recordings of his live shows. A bit on the pricey side, imho, but it does at least exist.

[dfxm12]

Why restrict it to ticket holders? I'm sure bands don't want to leave money on the table either. Metallica surely doesn't: https://www.metallica.com/store/live-metallica-cds/

[MilkLizard]

Metallica does or did this. I still have some mp3 of the shows I saw years ago.

[tracker1]

At the last "That Damn Show" in Phoenix (2001 iirc), a couple of the bands were burning and selling CDs from that show. Was kind of nice/wild to see.

[RajT88]

There's a niche market for this. Whoever builds it will make a good living, I feel.