[aviswanathan]

I think Phish's style is really similar to the Allman Brothers' back in their heyday. Although I doubt they profited massively from it, Live At Fillmore East is a jam rocker's dream album.

This article brings up an interesting thought: back in the '60s and '70s when most rock bands extended improvisations into their concerts (Led Zep, Hendrix, Floyd, etc.), did none of them think of recording and distributing each live show as a standalone piece like Phish? Or were they perhaps already 'mainstream enough'?

[timdev2]

At some point, probably in the 70s, Frank Zappa began obsessively multi-tracking nearly-all performances (at significant cost back then). This led to a bunch of interesting output, including things like compositions based on an improvised guitar solo, separated from it's original backing, and placed in a completely different harmonic context. Also, lots of straight-up live compilations (with some overdubs), chiefly the You Can't Do That On Stage Any More (YCDTOSA) series, which is a six volume set of double-CDs.

For most people, back in those days, getting a sufficiently high-quality recording of a live show was prohibitively expensive.

Like Phish, Zappa was very much a cottage industry, unmolested by mainstream music industry stuff after the very early days.

[Jgrubb]

Two things..

The Allman's Fillmore album (iirc) was their first #1 album, released within weeks of Dwayne's death. That album more or less cemented their financial viability to this day.

Recording live shows was not the trivial matter back in the analog era that it is today. You basically needed a trucks worth of absurdly expensive and delicate equipment to be set up and torn down every night, whereas most bands that multitrack their shows today plug one cable into their digital soundboard and that's all there is to it. Also, Phish's isn't releasing multitracks on livephish, those are most likely 4 track blends of the stereo soundboard feed mixed with a pair of crowd mics.