Legal Live Concert Recordings!

Record your next concert on a USB keychain

On May 21, new digital kiosks offering the tiny drives will be installed at Maxwell's, a small indie-rock club in Hoboken, N.J. At $10 a pop for the recording, and $20 for the reusable, keychain drive, let the downloading begin.

"This is a tool that allows fans to take home and share some of the best independent music from small live venues around the country," said Daniel Stein, CEO of Dimensional Associates, a private equity firm that owns eMusic Live, which created the machines, as well as eMusic, a music file-sharing Web site, and The Orchard, a marketing firm for independent labels.

For Scott Ambrose Reilly, president of eMusic Live, the idea is to let fans have a legal copy of a live show, which gives smaller artists and their labels creative control over the quality of the recording and a commercial stake in its distribution.

The understanding is also that it is not a one-time recording. Fans can share the files with their friends, providing free word-of-mouth publicity for smaller bands.

This is a great idea and one that has been irritatingly slow to come to fruition. We've had the technology to do this for years. The form that tech has taken for this venture and the copyright permissions that have been agreed upon were the only roadblocks.

The technology is quite simple: The music fan goes up to the touch-screen kiosk after the show and buys the keychain drive with a credit card from a dispenser alongside the screen. Once that's done, the miniature drive is inserted into a slot in the kiosk, and the recording - stored as MP3 files - is loaded onto the device's 128-megabyte hard drive. That is enough space for 110 minutes of music.

A receipt for the transaction is sent to the concertgoer's e-mail address.

Of course, this means only shows in venues that have these stations installed can be "legally" copied like this.

"Admittedly this won't be for everyone," Reilly said. "But since the direction of music is increasingly going digital, I don't see why this wouldn't find its niche."

Copyright 2004 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

I think this has insane potential for growth.

Why do we go to live shows? I go because:

1. I'm a fan of the artists and I want to support their work more directly.
   
2. I want to mingle with other fans.
   
3. Often the artists play something new or original during live shows that won't get officially published.
   
4. Just as often, the artists play remixed versions of their songs that won't get published.
   
5. Musicians covering other musicians' songs are a rare treat.
   
6. Artist-specific gear is sometimes available at live shows.

Among other reasons, it's the uniqueness of the event that draws me to live music. And if I can capture that uniqueness in a high quality so I can play it back again for myself, I want in on it. I'd spend money on this before I bought a T-shirt, no doubt.

There are products available now that can record sound directly to a USB drive (Creative Labs Nomad MuVo, Mercury iXA321i, ARCHOS Gmini 120, and iRiver iFP-195T...among many others), but I have little faith in their microphones' ability to accurately capture the high volume and wide range of live music. Bouncers at live venues also tend to not like bringing in these portable hard drives and solid-state MP3 recorders into their shows. Price is also a factor: I don't have the $120-$400 for these things. The cheaper ones below this range are for voice dictation, not music recording. Plopping down $30 for the one-time package and then paying $10 per live show is a fantastic deal.

I hope Austin gets a few of these!

Posted by Drizzten at April 29, 2004 11:53 AM