Exploring Music Trading :: Essays Papers

Exploring Music Trading Background The recording of live music goes back over a century to the beginnings of audio recording technology itself. The organized recording and trading of a band's live shows by devoted fans, however, is generally traced back to the late '60s or early '70s. The first band which allowed and encouraged such activity was, of course, the Grateful Dead. Although the Dead never had a true radio hit, they were able to become the most consistently successful touring act of all time in no small part by allowing their fans to record and then trade (but never sell) copies of each of their live shows. Both the library and music trading communities may find themselves under profit-minded assault in the present and near future. By the time the Grateful Dead called it a career in 1995 with the death of guitarist and guru Jerry Garcia, a number of other bands had taken notice and were emulating the practice of allowing audience taping and trading. Prominent among these bands were first-wave "HORDE" (named for a successful festival tour) or "jambands" such as Phish and Blues Traveler. Despite the lack of MTV or radio support, Phish managed to gross over $20 million per year from their tours in the late '90s. The band consistently sold out venues for multi-day runs, while MTV-friendly bands were playing in front of half-full houses. While there is no real estimate of the number of touring bands today which allow audience taping and trading, a rough guess would place the low end at well over a hundred (given that 80-taper friendly bands were at the High Sierra Music Festival last summer, and at least an equal number were not). Many of these bands now allow, encourage or initiate the posting of their shows to var ious online sites such as www.archive.org (a must-see site for all library types, not just for the excellent live shows contained therein), usually in SHN or FLAC formats, where they are available for free download to anyone with a high-speed connection. Given the harsh attitude of the major recording labels (as expressed through the Recording Industry Association of America's various peer-to-peer lawsuits) toward "unauthorized" distribution of copyrighted recordings on the ground that it damages the fortunes of their artists [author's note: one should be properly skeptical of any record company claims of interest in their artists' well being], why, then would bands allow the essentially free distribution of live shows?