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Rare concert recordings are landing on the Internet Archive

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Re: Rare concert recordings are landing on the Internet Archive

#81

I am an active and enthusiastic recordist and have decades of stuff I've accumulated over the years. One of the concerts I captured in the 90's, lives on as a bootleg which I often see around the scene of this one particularly great live electronic dance band, whose punters have created true value out of the hour and a half of live concert input I managed to record, standing right there front stage and center, with t…

You made me curious about the recording, could you share the youtube link for it? Only if you are comfortable with it, ofc

Re: Rare concert recordings are landing on the Internet Archive

#82

I am an active and enthusiastic recordist and have decades of stuff I've accumulated over the years. One of the concerts I captured in the 90's, lives on as a bootleg which I often see around the scene of this one particularly great live electronic dance band, whose punters have created true value out of the hour and a half of live concert input I managed to record, standing right there front stage and center, with t…

We shouldn’t need the managers, but the record industry does everything it can to consolidate everything. However, I do notice that for more uncommon music, the record industry sort it just looks the other way. For example Eminem has tons of really old music on YouTube that I’m sure his lawyers could figure out how to get taken down. But it just stays up. I would really like music copyright to change within my lifeti…

> the record industry does everything it can to consolidate everything.

Financialization ? Productize, promote, push ?

Re: Rare concert recordings are landing on the Internet Archive

#83

I am an active and enthusiastic recordist and have decades of stuff I've accumulated over the years. One of the concerts I captured in the 90's, lives on as a bootleg which I often see around the scene of this one particularly great live electronic dance band, whose punters have created true value out of the hour and a half of live concert input I managed to record, standing right there front stage and center, with t…

We shouldn’t need the managers, but the record industry does everything it can to consolidate everything. However, I do notice that for more uncommon music, the record industry sort it just looks the other way. For example Eminem has tons of really old music on YouTube that I’m sure his lawyers could figure out how to get taken down. But it just stays up. I would really like music copyright to change within my lifeti…

I agree mostly but take issue with "not needing managers". As someone who went from split shows to big venues to touring, managers (good ones) are a godsend.

Will there be convenient parking?

Do they have adequate power?

Is the stage big enough?

Do we need to book sound?

Is there a weather contingency?

Where can we sleep?

What time is load in?

What time is sound check?

What form of payment?

How will they be advertising?

Who do we give promotional materials to?

Etc etc. Having someone take care of all this stuff allows us to focus on practicing and recording (which has another long list of questions that need to be addressed).

Not to mention networking and venue access. Put all that stuff together and it's a full time job that artists are poorly equipped to handle.

Re: Rare concert recordings are landing on the Internet Archive

#84

This is one of the best things I've read about in a bit. It wasn't uncommon to buy marked-up (overpriced) bootlegs of live performances on CDs in the 90s. You never knew in advance if it'd be a quality recording or total garbage. We've lost that. I still love when one of my live bootlegs of Faith No More comes on with them doing (sometimes mocking) parodies of popular music (their rendition of Nothing Compares to You…

Are you certain Faith No More did the cover? There's certainly a Mr. Bungle version [0] from a San Francisco gig in 1990. I remember grabbing this from the Bungle Fever FTP site back in around '99. I'd often download the bootlegs, burn them to audio CD and print out a cover of the gig poster if one was available. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTfSrUThyDk

[deleted]

Re: Rare concert recordings are landing on the Internet Archive

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you really want to share it, how about torrenting it?

IA makes the most sense in the spirit of preservation. Etree ( https://www.etree.org/ ) is the longest running torrent site for tapes. It looks like only about 5% of the hundred thousand torrents have any seeders at all. Not sure how reliable requesting a seed is. I’d expect long tail stuff to get “effectively lost”. Versus IA whose purpose and funding is preservation, in addition to sharing.

This is a fun area, as the DMCA, for its flaws included a loophole for non-commercial distribution of live concert recordings. The only requirement is that it isn't an exact copy of a commercial release. I am not sure about the exact standards, as live albums often aren't the entire concert. Here are some other sites where people share these tapes.

http://www.thetradersden.org/

https://sugarmegs.org/

http://www.dimeadozen.org/

Re: Rare concert recordings are landing on the Internet Archive

#86
post #57
post #52

I have my worries about Internet Archive more and more recently. I'm wondering though is there any decentralized IPFS or P2P Archive of the entire archive that can be helped with for preservation ? https://www.wired.com/story/the-internets-most-powerful-arch...

According to the Wikipedia page, it seems that copies of the archive are stored around the world. LOCKSS is a decentralized strategy for preservation which includes archival copies at remote sites. It has been in use for a very long time. I feel like preservation via IPFS would introduce quite a bit of risk to the goal.

I can find no current public document from the Internet Archive explaining what is backed up, where, or at what redundancy level.

From a 2016 blog post:

"Do you do backups too, for example to guard against corrupt data getting mirrored across both copies, or accidental deletion?"

John Gonzalez, the author and IA infrastructure lead, replied:

"We have done experiments to confirm that we can back up large portions of our corpus... but this is not a regular practice for us at this time."

https://blog.archive.org/2016/10/25/20000-hard-drives-on-a-m...

Re: Rare concert recordings are landing on the Internet Archive

#87
post #18

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).

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

Re: Rare concert recordings are landing on the Internet Archive

#88
post #73
post #18

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).

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.

> 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?

Re: Rare concert recordings are landing on the Internet Archive

#89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We shouldn’t need the managers, but the record industry does everything it can to consolidate everything. However, I do notice that for more uncommon music, the record industry sort it just looks the other way. For example Eminem has tons of really old music on YouTube that I’m sure his lawyers could figure out how to get taken down. But it just stays up. I would really like music copyright to change within my lifeti…

I agree mostly but take issue with "not needing managers". As someone who went from split shows to big venues to touring, managers (good ones) are a godsend. Will there be convenient parking? Do they have adequate power? Is the stage big enough? Do we need to book sound? Is there a weather contingency? Where can we sleep? What time is load in? What time is sound check? What form of payment? How will they be advertisi…

I assumed managers in this context, meant the record industry machine. Most bands don’t care if you find a bootleg of a live recording, it’s going to be a very different experience versus an actual album anyway.

Re: Rare concert recordings are landing on the Internet Archive

#90
On the afternoon of October 6 1989 I attended a Fugazi concert in Cambridge Mass, probably one of the best live shows I've ever seen.

Last year I casually searched YouTube for some shows I had attended in my youth and this one popped up, recorded by a high school classmate who happened to be there, filming from the side from a balcony or rope rack used by stagehands.

I then went to the Fugazi Live Series archive to see if there was better quality audio (the band recorded most of their shows from the 1980s through the early 2000s, and posted almost all of them in the archive). That October 1989 concert was in the database (https://dischord.com/fugazi_live_series/cambridge-ma-usa-100...), and there were some comments by others who attended, but there was no supporting media other than a single photograph.

So I emailed the address on the website:

Hi, regarding this show someone created a video recording from which the audio can probably be extracted. It's on YouTube here:

https://youtu.be/0XS3QD2cddo?si=1TM9PglNv-Rlr98w

I was at the show but not near the stage. It was a memorable show for me and many others according to the description on the official Fugazi archive.

The uploader of the video (my high school classmate, who I believe was a member of the FUs at some point) says:

"In 1989, I went to the First Congregational Church, In Harvard Sq. Cambridge Massachusetts, in hopes of getting into this Fugazi show. Unfortunately, the promoter pre-sold the tickets to people he knew. Thus there was a large crowd of people trying to get in without tickets. Fortunately for me, I had been friends with him before, and he let my girlfriend and I in. Once inside, I asked Guy if I could videotape the show, he told me to go ahead... as long as I sent a copy of the video to Dischord Records... I never did... I just wasn't responsible enough in those days to bother... anyway, here it is, the full show, in all it's faded and low resolution glory... so go ahead, enjoy, and share."

To my surprise, Ian MacKaye responded! While he could extract the audio from YouTube, he wanted to know if I could get in touch with my high school classmate who might still have the original tapes which would have better quality. I did, and my classmate actually got the tapes (from his old girlfriend, who had them in a box in her basement) and shipped them off to Ian. At some point they will be properly digitized and put on the Fugazi archive.

I had a long interview with Ian about archiving which I hope to post on my blog later this summer. To make a long story short, he's amassed a huge collection of materials from Fugazi and his previous bands (most notably Minor Threat) which includes concert audio, studio audio, video, photos, concert flyers, and every piece of fan mail they received at Dischord House from the 1980s to the present day.

He's very systematic about organizing the archives, thanks to interactions with trained archivists including several working for the federal government (he's based in Washington DC).

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