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 the band looking right at me.
It was a hilarious experience - I expected to get booted out pretty fast, so I held my ground as still as I could, DAT-tape rolling by, shotgun mike held in front of me like it was just normal, as if I belonged there.
The lead singer caught my eye and gave me a wide grin. I survived the concert, it was awesome, but boy was I relieved to have made it home with that DAT - which I of course, proceeded to digitize with my brand new spdf/io ..
The next year the band (who are big and famous, btw) were in the same city and I happened to be around, I got invited backstage to meet the band, participate in a bit of nerdery regarding their live setup and gear and so on, and talk about that recording I'd made.
I'd put it out as a pure bootleg, no questions asked.
Turns out they'd heard it and enjoyed it and came to appreciate the nature of their bootleggers, as avid fans who gave the band themselves something extra to think about in what was then, a burgeoning digital/online universe about to explode.
So, seeing it around, almost 30 years now .. here and there, again and again .. is quite hilarious. Youtube often recommends it to me in my playlist, its just there.
And at a certain spot in the recording, I tell my mate to stop standing so close to me (he was blocking the shottie), and prepare for my ass getting bounced - which never happened, thankfully.
So yeah, I just wanna say, if you personally have the desire to be a recordist, and have a pure purpose in it, I'd say just freakin' go for it.
Record All The Things.
Its good for the Artists, yo. And also their fans. (Its how we get rid of the managers, cough cough..)
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 lifetime. It should realistically be 30 years from first release, and after that it should go straight to the public domain. By then everyone’s made their money. Even Elvis won’t be public domain until like 2050 or 2060. I don’t really think he needs the money right now.
> 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.
Or artists that have seen the merit in tolerating it/somewhat encouraging it. I'm a pretty hardcore Nine Inch Nails fan (seen >30 shows).
NINLive.com is a fantastic (unofficial) archive for our community. Close to 2k individual recordings, about 3/4 of all shows they've ever played have at least one recording.
NIN's camp is fully aware, the guy who runs the site has gotten invited to meet the band before. (And NIN has tossed unedited pro-shot tour footage to the fans before to play with, as well as things like directly linking to a fan-compiled concert film for another tour on their own home page).
NIN had a messy breakup with their original manager about 15 years into things. Once Trent Reznor emerged as more or less a free agent, he embraced radical approaches to distributing music and other media.
The instrumental album "Ghosts I-IV" was released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license, and the music went everywhere - and you can draw a line directly from that choice to the Oscar for the score for The Social Network.
Rumor has it that Trent Reznor himself uploaded material to The Pirate Bay, because he didn't like the audio quality of the rips that were already floating around. There are three compilations that appeared, with custom artwork, including at least one exclusive version of a track that hasn't appeared anywhere else.
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.
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.
Well that would be legal/contractual stuff you signed with the label. Doesn't have anything to do with managers, which was why I wasn't really sure what parent was saying.
As a huge fan of the type of music you're probably describing, I'd love to know what artist/recording you're referring to here. Surely with the band's blessing and ~30 years of time passed, it'd be okay to divulge...
Wow, this is very cool, I have been looking for the Phish show at Lounge Ax from November 1990 (opening for Alex Chilton of Big Star) for ages. It was first time I saw them live, and next time they came around they graduated from a 300 person club to a 3000 person ballroom!
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 by Sinead OConnor has been in my head as I type this). When I got to see them in 2010 (I think) they were true to form and played a bunch of short (reinterpretations) covers and it was one of the best aspects of the show. And I still have a Mr Bungle bootleg with them covering Existential Blues by Tom "T-Bone" Stankus (I always thought it was Doctor Demento's Wizard of Oz until just now when I looked it up).
How would you even know about these awesome gems without bootlegs or access to see all their live shows? YouTube is less likely to capture an entire show than a clip, whereas the bootlegs were typically the full show. There are probably areas of the internet where this stuff gets shared and traded, but having it in my local music shop meant everyone had access without requiring special knowledge.
I just did two searches, one Google and one Kagi, and neither turned up the FNM Nothing Compares to You. Who knows how many copies of it exist in the world. If my music library gets nuked, who will even know about it? I think I'm gonna start uploading my bootleg recordings of live shows to IA.
I remember this too. Those bootlegs were $30 each and my friend group was really into Pearl Jam. If I remember correctly a lot of these were made out of Italy. In college (maybe late 90s) I somehow managed to come up with $500 to buy a CD burner. I would make copies of these bootlegs and sell to friends for $10. I couldn't keep up and made my money back to pay for the burner relatively quickly. I think I was even able to find some to download then burning saving me the $30 at the record store. I made my own funny CD covers. Once I got my money back for the CD burner I just asked for the cost of the Cds. Great trip down memory lane.
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.
> You never knew in advance if it'd be a quality recording or total garbage.
I once bought a VHS recording of a Lemonheads gig after seeing them at the Glastonbury festival, guess it must have been around 1993, and in visual terms it was absolutely unwatchable - the camera wasn't still for a second - but probably pretty representative of what it was like to be there.
Mike Patton loves pop music. Those covers were most likely not mocking anything. I love me some Faith No More but haven't heard them cover Nothing Compares 2 U (which is actually a Prince tune). I'll have to check it out.
EDIT: You weren't kidding. I can't find a cover of it. Please! Share 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.
Etree is missing self-seed then. What if IA hosted torrents like Etree does but also self-seeded the content?
Thus they are encouraging amateur third parties to pick up some of the archival slack, that style of torrent could outlive IA in case anything happened to them, and it reduces some of their bandwidth costs
It's funny to think how much effort was put into preventing bootlegging, when now everything is being recorded all the time.
The few bands that didn't care or even encouraged it reaped the benefits. I was a huge Ween fan in the 90s and bootlegged a show of theirs myself. Camera and recording devices were allowed and the result was a tremendous amount of live content available online. For some bands this might not matter, but they rarely played the same set list twice and often played songs differently from show to show. In the early internet days, there was more ween content online than you could ever hope to listen to.
Effort is still being put into it. Just this weekend YouTube put the 4K Coachella streams behind SABR. I could still get 1080p easily but 4K required some fanangling.
I remember back in the early 90s I think on the internet when it was only accessible via my university, reading on a newsgroup about how people traded bootlegs from various concerts. People would mail cassette tapes around the country and would use double cassette recorders to make a copy of their bootleg and mail it back to people. It was definitely a different time
There was lots of "tape trading" back then. Video too. Foreign TV shows, regional programming, etc. If not technically Internet material, i think this is certainly in the spirit of the Internet Archive.
Seconded. This was a great read, and led me to a lot of great listening. And some wondering about how far Minutemen would've went if D. Boon hadn't passed so early.
I also think there's a lot to learn from the book about DIY for any startup or community organizer.
Lastly, if you read and you want to learn more about 'The Replacements', 'Trouble Boys', Bob Mehr, is a terrific read.
This was one of the first - if not the first - CD I bought for myself, using my own (allowance) money! I was probably too young to listen to it, but blink-182 is my favorite band and I listened to this CD so many times that I pretty much memorized all the stupid banter between tracks.
I also liked sharing certain tracks with my friends when they came over...
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).
I love going to concerts and I tried pitching this to producers, bands, etc. They just don't care unfortunately.
My mindset was: They already did most of the work, just exporting the audio (that already exists!) would give them extra income. Could be a subscription service, or pay per album, or even for free (it's a marketing channel).
Some bands don't want their live recording out there (multiple reasons: from errors during the live show, or to keep the experience exclusive, or they think some people won't want to go to see them live if they already can listen to it). There is also the aspect of "If we release it for free or in the platform, we can't never make an actual live recording album", which could make some sense.
For years I dreamt about this "Netflix for unreleased live concerts" platform but I couldn't reach anything. Maybe I am really bad seller, and I just needed help from someone with more experience with the industry.
I ended up doing this unofficially for my faovurite artist, with the help of friends and collectors, uploading bootlegs (sometimes amateur recordings, sometimes board sound recording), and catalogued so you can search for all the plays of a particular song, or an album, how many times this song was played, if there was a guest, filter by country, city, year, etc, etc.
There was a German startup called Bleecker Street [1] about a decade ago that did exactly that. They toured with artists like Chris Rea, Simple Minds, and Mark Knopfler, tapping directly into the FOH desk at each venue. They would mix the audio live, even adding the ambient noise of the crowd to capture the live feeling.
Right after the show, you could buy fancy looking USB sticks, designed with unique elements of the artists, pre-loaded with the recording of the set you had just heard.
I still have a guitar-shaped USB stick from a Mark Knopfler show at a small venue in a tiny town in southern Germany. Honestly, it’s a far better souvenir than any picture I could have taken.
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.
It's not just a subscription thing, you can purchase individual shows ala bandcamp too.
But yeah, jam bands have really embraced this more than any other category of artist - it's quite common even among low-mid tier jam bands that every single show ends up on Nugs. These bands are often pretty friendly to recordists too (a recent show I was at has two recordings on the IA as well as the Nugs version. Everyone's happy!)
Mike Doughty used to sell burned CDs of the show at the merch table (afterwards in case anyone was worried he was using some Is Chicago, Is Not Chicago technique to violate the space time continuum) back in the aughts.
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.
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?
Fugazi released almost 900 shows on CD in the early 2000’s, costing 5 bucks a piece. Some of them are available on their Bandcamp page these days too https://fugazi.bandcamp.com/.
I think (I could be wrong), that relatively few people would value the recordings from every show on a tour. But, many more people would value somewhat exclusive access to the recording for a show they attended in person.
As someone else mentioned above, with jam bands each performance is unique, and people definitely value getting access to every show. For bands repeating the same set as identically as possible on a tour, not sure how much it matters which performance you listen to. Although some people might be into it, for the "I was there" novelty factor.
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.
Yeah, there is some popular misunderstanding about what IPFS is... a lot of people seem to think its essentially free or subsidized distributed cloud storage. But the more you dig into it, the more you realize it's just a fairly inefficient caching system.
LOCKSS looks interesting but it seems like it's exclusively for libraries.
I used to record concerts I went to with a minidisc player and a small battery powered mic.. I have Beck, Radiohead, Dj Shadow, Kid koala, Q-bert.
Defo fun to listen back to, especially the bullshit my friends and I were saying.
Also there was a shop in Temple Bar Dublin that seemed to specialise in selling bootlegs. They were really expensive, but really good, clearly taken from the sound desk.
Not to demerit the recording, but I felt more nostalgic for the last sentence of the article "Sometimes, the internet is good" than for the musics itself.
Many software companies in the 80s were quiet about their software being bootlegged because it turned out to be great for building a critical mass of users of their software.
For those interested, Relisten is another repository of live concert recordings. It skews heavily towards improvisational music, ie jambands, but there's some indie rock on there as well.
Cool site, thanks! it seems to also be backed by archive.org, i wonder if there's a way to move more stuff into that interface. the nirvana performance in the article isn't there for instance.
Really interesting to see how far this story has spread, I saw it in my Chicago groups first and now it’s popped up in outlets all over the world. I guess it shows how nostalgic we are for an earlier time, both in music and internet culture.
I have a friend that used to record a lot of concerts... a surprising number of bands would even let him plug into the panel to do so. IIRC, mostly using a digital tape recorder later transferred to computer over firewire in the late 90s and 00s.
if you really want to hear a live performance, there seems to be a nudge from amazon lately.
if your into providing music, dont default to a live version.
some live recordings are good, you can actually hear the music, and the crowd is only noticble between songs.
im thinking that an online archive of live concerts will only steepen this trend.
im just going back to all my mp3 media more often nowadays [bcz i actually bought it mp3 versions, decades ago when you still could]
that way i can hear music, instead of a bunch of people screaming over the music.
now heres somthing else, maybe you remember that concert, you were there, you love hearing you and friends at the concert, maybe people who no longer live are still there. jimmy dean, rock on,
Yeah, anachronism means 'not belonging to the time period'. If you made a 1980s movie and had the protagonist transfer cassettes to a laptop via USB interface, THAT would be an anachronism.
I think the author meant "old-fashioned" or "obsolete". Though using a cassette deck to read cassettes, geez, what else are you going to do? Build your own using an Arduino?
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:
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).
Minor Threat was before my time, but I've seen Fugazi and The Evens a few times. Ian always puts on a great show. He seems like a really thoughtful, detail oriented guy. I'm not surprised that he keeps organized archives or that he found the time to respond.
My blog is related to my genealogy business, not music. But the story about archiving old audio and video is relevant to the struggle of many genealogists to preserve old media, a frequent topic on the blog:
There are so many concert recordings of awesome performances that sound like crap because they are audience tapes.
Often before a performance recorded music is played and captured in the audience recordings.
Would it be possible to train a model on an archive of these concert audience recordings of studio recordings paired with the original studio recordings to develop a system to “clean up” audience recordings?
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 the band looking right at me.
It was a hilarious experience - I expected to get booted out pretty fast, so I held my ground as still as I could, DAT-tape rolling by, shotgun mike held in front of me like it was just normal, as if I belonged there.
The lead singer caught my eye and gave me a wide grin. I survived the concert, it was awesome, but boy was I relieved to have made it home with that DAT - which I of course, proceeded to digitize with my brand new spdf/io ..
The next year the band (who are big and famous, btw) were in the same city and I happened to be around, I got invited backstage to meet the band, participate in a bit of nerdery regarding their live setup and gear and so on, and talk about that recording I'd made.
I'd put it out as a pure bootleg, no questions asked.
Turns out they'd heard it and enjoyed it and came to appreciate the nature of their bootleggers, as avid fans who gave the band themselves something extra to think about in what was then, a burgeoning digital/online universe about to explode.
So, seeing it around, almost 30 years now .. here and there, again and again .. is quite hilarious. Youtube often recommends it to me in my playlist, its just there.
And at a certain spot in the recording, I tell my mate to stop standing so close to me (he was blocking the shottie), and prepare for my ass getting bounced - which never happened, thankfully.
So yeah, I just wanna say, if you personally have the desire to be a recordist, and have a pure purpose in it, I'd say just freakin' go for it.
Record All The Things.
Its good for the Artists, yo. And also their fans. (Its how we get rid of the managers, cough cough..)
Great story, but how are you going to say all that but not link to the recording?
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 lifetime. It should realistically be 30 years from first release, and after that it should go straight to the public domain. By then everyone’s made their money. Even Elvis won’t be public domain until like 2050 or 2060. I don’t really think he needs the money right now.
> 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.
Or artists that have seen the merit in tolerating it/somewhat encouraging it. I'm a pretty hardcore Nine Inch Nails fan (seen >30 shows).
NINLive.com is a fantastic (unofficial) archive for our community. Close to 2k individual recordings, about 3/4 of all shows they've ever played have at least one recording.
NIN's camp is fully aware, the guy who runs the site has gotten invited to meet the band before. (And NIN has tossed unedited pro-shot tour footage to the fans before to play with, as well as things like directly linking to a fan-compiled concert film for another tour on their own home page).
NIN had a messy breakup with their original manager about 15 years into things. Once Trent Reznor emerged as more or less a free agent, he embraced radical approaches to distributing music and other media.
The instrumental album "Ghosts I-IV" was released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license, and the music went everywhere - and you can draw a line directly from that choice to the Oscar for the score for The Social Network.
Concert photos, wallpapers, and other photos are still up on Flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/nineinchnails/albums
And the NIN camp utilized Vimeo alongside YouTube: https://vimeo.com/ninofficial
Rumor has it that Trent Reznor himself uploaded material to The Pirate Bay, because he didn't like the audio quality of the rips that were already floating around. There are three compilations that appeared, with custom artwork, including at least one exclusive version of a track that hasn't appeared anywhere else.
(p.s. wot up volk)
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.
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.
Well that would be legal/contractual stuff you signed with the label. Doesn't have anything to do with managers, which was why I wasn't really sure what parent was saying.
> the record industry does everything it can to consolidate everything.
Financialization ? Productize, promote, push ?
"Record All The Things."
Unless you use a crappy smartphone with a bright annoying screen ..
I loved reading this with the still built-in caginess around all the identifying details. Just in case!
As a huge fan of the type of music you're probably describing, I'd love to know what artist/recording you're referring to here. Surely with the band's blessing and ~30 years of time passed, it'd be okay to divulge...
You made me curious about the recording, could you share the youtube link for it? Only if you are comfortable with it, ofc
What is a "punter"?
also common UK slang, for someone who constantly does things in the grey.
to wit: scammer, scheister, player.
In this case, an attendee to the concert.
More generally someone on the buying/risk side of a transaction.
Customer/fan/concertgoer.
Source article is more enjoyable http://blockclubchicago.org/2026/04/10/from-early-nirvana-to...
Here’s an article about The Sacramento Music Archive that’s also worth checking out.
https://www.kqed.org/arts/13979518/sacramento-music-archive-...
Go out and support your local live music scene.
This should be the link. Thanks
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47717957
Wow, this is very cool, I have been looking for the Phish show at Lounge Ax from November 1990 (opening for Alex Chilton of Big Star) for ages. It was first time I saw them live, and next time they came around they graduated from a 300 person club to a 3000 person ballroom!
Previous discussion: "Volunteers turn a fan's recordings of 10K concerts into an online treasure trove" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47687443 8-apr-2026 76 comments
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 by Sinead OConnor has been in my head as I type this). When I got to see them in 2010 (I think) they were true to form and played a bunch of short (reinterpretations) covers and it was one of the best aspects of the show. And I still have a Mr Bungle bootleg with them covering Existential Blues by Tom "T-Bone" Stankus (I always thought it was Doctor Demento's Wizard of Oz until just now when I looked it up).
How would you even know about these awesome gems without bootlegs or access to see all their live shows? YouTube is less likely to capture an entire show than a clip, whereas the bootlegs were typically the full show. There are probably areas of the internet where this stuff gets shared and traded, but having it in my local music shop meant everyone had access without requiring special knowledge.
I just did two searches, one Google and one Kagi, and neither turned up the FNM Nothing Compares to You. Who knows how many copies of it exist in the world. If my music library gets nuked, who will even know about it? I think I'm gonna start uploading my bootleg recordings of live shows to IA.
I remember this too. Those bootlegs were $30 each and my friend group was really into Pearl Jam. If I remember correctly a lot of these were made out of Italy. In college (maybe late 90s) I somehow managed to come up with $500 to buy a CD burner. I would make copies of these bootlegs and sell to friends for $10. I couldn't keep up and made my money back to pay for the burner relatively quickly. I think I was even able to find some to download then burning saving me the $30 at the record store. I made my own funny CD covers. Once I got my money back for the CD burner I just asked for the cost of the Cds. Great trip down memory lane.
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
> You never knew in advance if it'd be a quality recording or total garbage.
I once bought a VHS recording of a Lemonheads gig after seeing them at the Glastonbury festival, guess it must have been around 1993, and in visual terms it was absolutely unwatchable - the camera wasn't still for a second - but probably pretty representative of what it was like to be there.
Mike Patton loves pop music. Those covers were most likely not mocking anything. I love me some Faith No More but haven't heard them cover Nothing Compares 2 U (which is actually a Prince tune). I'll have to check it out.
EDIT: You weren't kidding. I can't find a cover of it. Please! Share it!
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/
Etree is missing self-seed then. What if IA hosted torrents like Etree does but also self-seeded the content?
Thus they are encouraging amateur third parties to pick up some of the archival slack, that style of torrent could outlive IA in case anything happened to them, and it reduces some of their bandwidth costs
IA always does that. Every download page also links to a torrent. Is that not the same as what you want?
It's funny to think how much effort was put into preventing bootlegging, when now everything is being recorded all the time.
The few bands that didn't care or even encouraged it reaped the benefits. I was a huge Ween fan in the 90s and bootlegged a show of theirs myself. Camera and recording devices were allowed and the result was a tremendous amount of live content available online. For some bands this might not matter, but they rarely played the same set list twice and often played songs differently from show to show. In the early internet days, there was more ween content online than you could ever hope to listen to.
Effort is still being put into it. Just this weekend YouTube put the 4K Coachella streams behind SABR. I could still get 1080p easily but 4K required some fanangling.
I remember back in the early 90s I think on the internet when it was only accessible via my university, reading on a newsgroup about how people traded bootlegs from various concerts. People would mail cassette tapes around the country and would use double cassette recorders to make a copy of their bootleg and mail it back to people. It was definitely a different time
Late 90s there were some great IRC channels for this. I was pretty active in one that revolved around a genre that I most enjoyed.
There was lots of "tape trading" back then. Video too. Foreign TV shows, regional programming, etc. If not technically Internet material, i think this is certainly in the spirit of the Internet Archive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tape_trading
I can't more highly recommend this book for getting into the headspace of the era a lot of these recordings.
11 chapters about DIY / Punk / Hardcore bands of the 1980s underground scene.
(The audiobook in particular is fun as it's read by musicians influenced by the artists in their respective chapters)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Band_Could_Be_Your_Life
Seconded. This was a great read, and led me to a lot of great listening. And some wondering about how far Minutemen would've went if D. Boon hadn't passed so early.
I also think there's a lot to learn from the book about DIY for any startup or community organizer.
Lastly, if you read and you want to learn more about 'The Replacements', 'Trouble Boys', Bob Mehr, is a terrific read.
> I also think there's a lot to learn from the book about DIY for any startup or community organizer.
The parallels with being in a band and a startup are real. Azerrad says many times in the book that what these bands were doing was entrepreneurial.
I enjoyed "live albums" a lot growing up.
The Mark, Tom, and Travis show was always a blast to listen to with my friends.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mark,_Tom,_and_Travis_Show...!)
This was one of the first - if not the first - CD I bought for myself, using my own (allowance) money! I was probably too young to listen to it, but blink-182 is my favorite band and I listened to this CD so many times that I pretty much memorized all the stupid banter between tracks.
I also liked sharing certain tracks with my friends when they came over...
HN thinks the exclamation point is punctuation and not part of the URL. Luckily wikipedia has a redirect already set up that will work: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Mark,_Tom,_an...
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).
I love going to concerts and I tried pitching this to producers, bands, etc. They just don't care unfortunately.
My mindset was: They already did most of the work, just exporting the audio (that already exists!) would give them extra income. Could be a subscription service, or pay per album, or even for free (it's a marketing channel).
Some bands don't want their live recording out there (multiple reasons: from errors during the live show, or to keep the experience exclusive, or they think some people won't want to go to see them live if they already can listen to it). There is also the aspect of "If we release it for free or in the platform, we can't never make an actual live recording album", which could make some sense.
For years I dreamt about this "Netflix for unreleased live concerts" platform but I couldn't reach anything. Maybe I am really bad seller, and I just needed help from someone with more experience with the industry.
I ended up doing this unofficially for my faovurite artist, with the help of friends and collectors, uploading bootlegs (sometimes amateur recordings, sometimes board sound recording), and catalogued so you can search for all the plays of a particular song, or an album, how many times this song was played, if there was a guest, filter by country, city, year, etc, etc.
There was a German startup called Bleecker Street [1] about a decade ago that did exactly that. They toured with artists like Chris Rea, Simple Minds, and Mark Knopfler, tapping directly into the FOH desk at each venue. They would mix the audio live, even adding the ambient noise of the crowd to capture the live feeling.
Right after the show, you could buy fancy looking USB sticks, designed with unique elements of the artists, pre-loaded with the recording of the set you had just heard.
I still have a guitar-shaped USB stick from a Mark Knopfler show at a small venue in a tiny town in southern Germany. Honestly, it’s a far better souvenir than any picture I could have taken.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20150205231438/http://www.bleeck...
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
This is very much a among jam bands - see https://www.nugs.net/
That looks like just a subscription thing, right?
I saw David Byrne last week, during checkout for the ticket I would probably have paid an extra $10 to get access to the recording of that show.
It's not just a subscription thing, you can purchase individual shows ala bandcamp too.
But yeah, jam bands have really embraced this more than any other category of artist - it's quite common even among low-mid tier jam bands that every single show ends up on Nugs. These bands are often pretty friendly to recordists too (a recent show I was at has two recordings on the IA as well as the Nugs version. Everyone's happy!)
Mike Doughty used to sell burned CDs of the show at the merch table (afterwards in case anyone was worried he was using some Is Chicago, Is Not Chicago technique to violate the space time continuum) back in the aughts.
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?
Fugazi released almost 900 shows on CD in the early 2000’s, costing 5 bucks a piece. Some of them are available on their Bandcamp page these days too https://fugazi.bandcamp.com/.
Not only that, you can listen to many of them for free from the Fugazi online concert archive: https://dischord.com/fugazi_live_series
(See my comment upthread about Fugazi and the unexpected encounter with Ian MacKaye after I stumbled upon an obscure YouTube recording)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47769059
Metallica does or did this. I still have some mp3 of the shows I saw years ago.
why not have it accessible to everyone so collectors can have a field day with it!
Are you working for free too?
Available for everyone to purchase*, not just the local venue ticket holders.
I think (I could be wrong), that relatively few people would value the recordings from every show on a tour. But, many more people would value somewhat exclusive access to the recording for a show they attended in person.
As someone else mentioned above, with jam bands each performance is unique, and people definitely value getting access to every show. For bands repeating the same set as identically as possible on a tour, not sure how much it matters which performance you listen to. Although some people might be into it, for the "I was there" novelty factor.
At the last "That Damn Show" in Phoenix (2001 iirc), a couple of the bands were burning and selling CDs from that show. Was kind of nice/wild to see.
There's a niche market for this. Whoever builds it will make a good living, I feel.
Why restrict it to ticket holders? I'm sure bands don't want to leave money on the table either. Metallica surely doesn't: https://www.metallica.com/store/live-metallica-cds/
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...
Yeah, there is some popular misunderstanding about what IPFS is... a lot of people seem to think its essentially free or subsidized distributed cloud storage. But the more you dig into it, the more you realize it's just a fairly inefficient caching system.
LOCKSS looks interesting but it seems like it's exclusively for libraries.
I used to record concerts I went to with a minidisc player and a small battery powered mic.. I have Beck, Radiohead, Dj Shadow, Kid koala, Q-bert. Defo fun to listen back to, especially the bullshit my friends and I were saying.
Also there was a shop in Temple Bar Dublin that seemed to specialise in selling bootlegs. They were really expensive, but really good, clearly taken from the sound desk.
Not to demerit the recording, but I felt more nostalgic for the last sentence of the article "Sometimes, the internet is good" than for the musics itself.
Many software companies in the 80s were quiet about their software being bootlegged because it turned out to be great for building a critical mass of users of their software.
For those interested, Relisten is another repository of live concert recordings. It skews heavily towards improvisational music, ie jambands, but there's some indie rock on there as well.
https://relisten.net/
Cool site, thanks! it seems to also be backed by archive.org, i wonder if there's a way to move more stuff into that interface. the nirvana performance in the article isn't there for instance.
One of the authors/maintainers of Relisten posted that they are working on adding the Aadam Jacbos collection - https://bsky.app/profile/saewitz.com/post/3mjawvvklls2v
Oh hey, it's me! Happy to answer any questions
So how long till your just greeted with a page telling you the archive has it, but you can't download it because of DMCA.
A discussion from six days ago (same story, different source):
https://apnews.com/article/aadam-jacobs-collection-concerts-...
Here's the discussion from 3 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47687443
I was pleased to find some "They Might Be Giants" in the archive.
Really interesting to see how far this story has spread, I saw it in my Chicago groups first and now it’s popped up in outlets all over the world. I guess it shows how nostalgic we are for an earlier time, both in music and internet culture.
Some stuff I snagged the other day when it was posted:
Elf Power Live at Lounge Ax 1998-04-25 https://archive.org/details/ajc01382_elf-power-1998-04-25
Fountains Of Wayne Live at The Vic Theatre 2003-11-19 https://archive.org/details/ajc00691_fountains-of-wayne-2003...
Fugazi Live at State Theatre on 1991-08-06 https://archive.org/details/ajc02237_fugazi1991-08-06.ajcpro...
Godspeed You! Black Emperor Live at Lounge Ax on 1999-09-16 https://archive.org/details/ajc02676_gybe1999-09-16.ajcproje...
Iron & Wine Live at Abbey Pub 2004-07-02 (Late show) https://archive.org/details/ajc01329_iron-wine-2004-07-02.la...
Josh Rouse Live at Schubas Tavern 2004-04-26 https://archive.org/details/ajc01208_josh-rouse-2004-04-26
Midnight Oil Live at Cabaret Metro 1988-04-30 https://archive.org/details/ajc02792_midnightoil1988-04-30
Neutral Milk Hotel Live at Lounge Ax 1997-05-01 https://archive.org/details/ajc00789_neutralmilkhotel1997-05...
OK Go Live at Belmont-Sheffield Music Festival 2003-05-31 https://archive.org/details/ajc01120_ok-go-2003-05-31
Pavement Live at Lounge Ax 1992-06-12 https://archive.org/details/ajc00811_pavement1992-06-12
Polyphonic Spree Live at Metro on 2003-10-07 https://archive.org/details/ajc01050-PolyphonicSpree2003-10-...
Ratatat Live at Abbey Pub 2004-05-14 https://archive.org/details/ajc01220_ratatat-2004-05-14
Rogue Wave Live at Schubas Tavern on 2005-01-30 https://archive.org/details/ajc01227_roguewave2005-01-30.ajc...
Super Furry Animals Live at Abbey Pub 2002-04-19 https://archive.org/details/ajc01144_super-furry-animals-200...
The Decemberists Live at Intonation Fest on 2005-07-17 https://archive.org/details/ajc00642_decemberists2005-07-17....
The Folk Implosion Live at Schubas Tavern 2000-02-29 (Late show) https://archive.org/details/ajc00963_folk_implosion_2000-02-...
The Shins Live at Schubas Tavern 2001-08-24 https://archive.org/details/ajc01131_the_shins_2001-08-24
Fugazi enjoyers should also know about their own very extensive archive of live shows
https://dischord.com/fugazi_live_series
I have a friend that used to record a lot of concerts... a surprising number of bands would even let him plug into the panel to do so. IIRC, mostly using a digital tape recorder later transferred to computer over firewire in the late 90s and 00s.
I'm reading this article and Weird Al's Don't Download this Song pops up on random play. Did Microsoft add Copilot to Media Player or something?
"Don't download this song (Don't do it, no, no) Even Lars Ulrich knows it's wrong (You can just ask him)"
Windows, right? If so, that’s your problem. Your computer is controlled by someone else.
(Just being snarky btw lol)
if you really want to hear a live performance, there seems to be a nudge from amazon lately.
if your into providing music, dont default to a live version.
some live recordings are good, you can actually hear the music, and the crowd is only noticble between songs.
im thinking that an online archive of live concerts will only steepen this trend.
im just going back to all my mp3 media more often nowadays [bcz i actually bought it mp3 versions, decades ago when you still could]
that way i can hear music, instead of a bunch of people screaming over the music.
now heres somthing else, maybe you remember that concert, you were there, you love hearing you and friends at the concert, maybe people who no longer live are still there. jimmy dean, rock on,
But what about copyright? Asking for a friend.
My friend Sam Altman said not to worry.
> he has to use anachronistic cassette decks to play the tapes, which get converted into digital files
Anachronistic?
It seems like a complicated way of saying "the tapes were digitized".
Yeah, anachronism means 'not belonging to the time period'. If you made a 1980s movie and had the protagonist transfer cassettes to a laptop via USB interface, THAT would be an anachronism.
I think the author meant "old-fashioned" or "obsolete". Though using a cassette deck to read cassettes, geez, what else are you going to do? Build your own using an Arduino?
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).
What's your blog?
Minor Threat was before my time, but I've seen Fugazi and The Evens a few times. Ian always puts on a great show. He seems like a really thoughtful, detail oriented guy. I'm not surprised that he keeps organized archives or that he found the time to respond.
My blog is related to my genealogy business, not music. But the story about archiving old audio and video is relevant to the struggle of many genealogists to preserve old media, a frequent topic on the blog:
https://easygenie.org/search?q=media&options%5Bprefix%5D=las...
Yeah but you know DMCA may intervene to delete it if they are copyrighted (as it happened with many media content before)
There are so many concert recordings of awesome performances that sound like crap because they are audience tapes.
Often before a performance recorded music is played and captured in the audience recordings.
Would it be possible to train a model on an archive of these concert audience recordings of studio recordings paired with the original studio recordings to develop a system to “clean up” audience recordings?
Maybe... however, most bands tend to drift a LOT from the studio versions of songs while touring.
>listen now
These are dangerous words to use for an archive site for material still protected under copyright.