Do you like good music? There’s nothing like getting out to hear it live, but if you’re reading this blog, my guess is you’ve downloaded a pretty healthy collection of live recordings, too. It’s an interesting hunger. With an artist like Taylor Hicks, we know the fix is out there, but the supply line is tenuous. Unlike an established mainstream artist, his commercial recordings are few. Unlike an established indie artist, he doesn’t have a set-up for openly feeding us live recordings. It may be awhile before this is fixed, but I’d like to talk about supply and demand. I’ll start with something I read a few weeks ago that kind of surprised me.

This is Perry Farrell, formerly of Jane’s Addiction, but interviewed here by SPIN magazine at the start of the festival season because of his role in founding Lollapalooza. He’s talking about free downloading:

….. The problem is, we have one of the few products in the world that can be obtained for nothing. So how do you now make a living and secure your intellectual property? Congress should be helping us, but they’re not going to. …… We need to change the laws. We need to legitimize peer-to-peer sharing as a business model, because it’s already a business. If [the P2P companies] are going to make money on us, we should have a chance to make some money along with them.

What would you say to the people doing the free downloading?
If you don’t care what happens to music, keep downloading. Look at music and look at the polar caps — they’re melting at the same rate. If you hear garbage music on your radio station, you have only yourself to blame. If you don’t support the arts, that’s what you’re going to get. You’re going to get American Idol. It’s fine if you want to hear that, but I don’t.

(full article)

Not sure that Farrell is talking just about downloads of live shows, but it got me thinking about what business arrangements were out there. Is peer-to-peer it, or what else? Plenty of artists are known to be “taper friendly” and have quite a bit up for free download at places like archive.org. Others are set up to offer live gigs for pay at their own web sites. For example, Tea Leaf Green is using both Snocap and BurnLounge (very cool resource - I’m seriously going to check this out more) to manage their sales. Widespread Panic is impressive in how quickly they get live shows available for sale. They’ve also got their stuff out at nugs.net, as do just about every other group you love live, such as Outformation and Perpetual Groove.

I’d love it if I could get Taylor Hicks’ live shows this way. My guess - and this is from a point of total ignorance about the business - is that it’s just not a possibility under his current contract. My guess is that major labels just don’t think this way - that it would be seen as competition with his own album (and frankly, it probably would be). But it’s cool to imagine a more just and open future.

or, to quote Farrell again:

So I’m going to try to do something about it. We’ll go out there and raise hell. Raise hell in a good way, I mean. We’ll party.

categories: biz, downloads, music
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