Why don't more bands do this?

[wags]

So this weekend I was hanging out with some friends of mine. All huge music fans. We got talking about live show distribution, what bands are good at it, what bands aren't, and our thoughts on what bands should do in the future.

My thought is that bands should offer for sale hard drives of their entire live show catalog. Yes it might seem over kill, but for the fan that has to have every waking minute of live time for review this would be ideal. The bands would sign off on the source material, make a deal with a hard drive manufacturer to supply the drives, the bands folks load them up and ship them out. The fan gets all the shows from beginning to present in a offically licensed product by the band. It would be amazing.

The next part of this idea is that once the fans have the drives, when new shows arrive in the bands live show pool fans could just add shows to the drive to keep them in order. I think this is an amazing idea if it could happen. It would require bands to create a live archive, with which they could charge so much per show, or offer deals for the entire catalog. Personally I think all bands should create a live domain for their shows, but that's the Phish/Dead fan in me.

Another idea I had was if bands would offer hard drives with the shows fans had seen and then charge the fan for this. Ok imagine your a huge GPN fan right. So you go to GPN's live site. You high light which shows you've been too, and drag them over to the "build your own hard drive" option. In ten business days you anwser the door and all your shows are there in crystal quality in a hard drive licensed by the band.

I just think this is the way to go in the future. It would allow bands to offer the life blood of the fans, live shows, and control the distribution of those shows. It would create another revenue stream for the band, and it would be an amazing way of getting the live material out to fans quickly.


Just a thought, what do you think?

[Wally C]

I dont think hard drives are the way to go. More likely, CD's or direct downloads. However, you would also need the band to record everyshow thru the soundboard. Not sure they do or even have done this in the past except for the Skoehagan show...(not sure if I spelled it right..but it was the Maine show CD)

This would be a go-forward endeavor, since the live stuff out there now can be anywhere from excellent to garbage as far as audio quality goes......but hey this could be another income stream for the band.

[joester]

much easier to do it like Gov't Mule does - record a nice board/audience matrix, and in a week or so, it's available for download for about 12.95.
no hard materials need to be exchanged - it's done on line. save to your phone, ipod, make cd's, whatever you want.
simple.
and, it takes the pressure off making an audience recording, and hoping you don't have to deal with chatty nieghbors, equipment troubles, time involved....

[Doc Zinger]

They just might do something like that in time, think the ways of delivering product are still evolving. Think the band looks to groups like GovMule to see how they do things, so they might pick up on this idea.

[wags]

Yeah if were strickly speaking GPN the need a live site like gov. mule/phish.
Record the show, make it available like the next day for purchase.

I just want all of the shows and would pay someone to compile all of them in one spot. That was my though this weekend.

[Tekawitha]

Wags - some great thoughts! In the beginning, I would burn the flac files, religiously...but now, with the amount of shows and the busy-ness of life, I don't keep up...would so enjoy the shows in cronological order! And, I think your income/revenue-generating point is very welcome these days. [have had folks tell me how the LOVE GPN, then proceed to relate how someone burned them some CDs!] In these fast-changing technological times, the old ways of funding tours and records, etc. have also changed. To overcome the lack of income from "record" sales, these live show CD's might really work...
Keep thinking - love it!