Guardian Unlimited | Online | Ministers of sound
Last week, Clear Channel, the American radio and concert promotion giant, was reported to be preparing plans to offer live recordings of concerts on CD, at the venue, five minutes after the curtain falls. According to a report in the Boston Globe, by recording directly off the sound mixing desk, and using a bank of cheap CD burners, they will be able to sell concert goers perfect recordings.
The scheme is reportedly to be piloted in small venues in spring with, most likely, the first MP3s appearing on file-sharing networks around 30 minutes later.
And there lies the rub. For bands whose main audience is the live one, allowing fans live recordings of the previous night’s show could be a winner. For the more possessive record labels, it’s a potential nightmare. When stadia could shift 20,000 CDs in an evening and provide free advertising for the rest of the tour, it is so potentially lucrative, it might just be the one that forces labels to reconsider their policy towards file sharing.
This is an interesting development. Will all acts go along with it? Why not? After all, you just paid for the show, why not take it home? But then the filesharing aspect rears its head: will the record companies be willing to accept that music recordings for which they paid zero production cost and zero promotion cost will be available as viral marketing tools that at least some listeners will have paid for the privilege of distributing?
If this doesn’t wake them up, what will?
In the same issue of the Guardian, we have this headline: Web piracy hits music sales.
Reading the article, it’s more of the same: sales are flat but releases by a few big stars were enough to stem the industry’s losses. What about the other artists who aren’t as well promoted?