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.
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.
> 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).
I got invited to see a NIN show recently, which was very kind of them.
The process of actually getting in, post-invite, was a bit of a weird experience: Waiting around at the front of the venue, meeting some of his PR folks, walking all the way around the outside to go in the back door to get escorted in. At one point we were given some armbands so we could do what we wanted as if we were regular concert-goers and they turned us loose.
Anyway, as we were walking around that huge place and chatting, one of them (Marcus?) asked me how I got interested in Nine Inch Nails.
And the first thing that came that came out of my mouth was "It is entirely possible that I banned Trent Reznor from IRC 30 years ago."
The response was immediate: "Never tell him that."
Anyhow, the crew that I met were all a bunch of great folks. Wonderful positivity, fun to talk to. 10/10.
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(Now, you might be wondering why I banned Trent from #nin. That's easy: We banned everyone in that channel who said they were Trent Reznor. There's only one Trent, and these imposters showed up all the time so we did the right thing and got rid of them.
Except... I read an interview with him way back then, where he was asked specifically about IRC. His response was something like "Yeah, I tried IRC once and they banned me right away. Those guys are a bunch of dicks."
I mostly wrote a story about a concert. It was an amazing concert. I also wrote a missive about banning Trent Reznor from IRC three decades ago.
At the show, the music was good (of course it was -- I like NIN and have for decades), but the musicality of its performance was also very good. They all played it both with expert precision, and a great deal of passion. The endurance was staggering. And the technicals -- the management of different spaces (3 stages!), the PA, the lights, effects, video projections -- they all combined to alter my perspective of what is possible in a temporary, physical performance space.
I love going to concerts, big and small. This was my 4th NIN show. I've never been to any concert like that before.
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Anyway, you've already elected to change channels. So let's change channels.
You think Pretty Hate Machine was the embodiment of everything that Trent Reznor ever learned, or performed?
How does Broken fit into that picture? (It's very different, to me.)
How does the period-correct Purest Feeling fit into it? (It's very similar, but the horns are a bit much.)
How do the various Ghosts albums fit in there?
How do the rest of them?
What fits together, and what falls apart?
Please elaborate. While I'm not a musician and I don't have the background to dissect it myself, I do appreciate the elaborations of technical makeups of music when those who can take it apart elect to do so.
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The dude, Trent Reznor, has been publishing recorded music since 1989. I find the claim that it's all the same to be pretty extraordinary. I think that satisfaction of that claim would require extraordinary proof. (And I welcome that proof.)
I’m glad you’ve enjoyed it all and will take nothing away from that. I listen a lot of very challenging industrial and electronic music that drives most people away, so I’m not on a high horse here.
I listen to his albums and soundtracks and hear themes from Pretty Hate Machine over and over. His demo recordings before Pretty Hate Machine, which were more pop, really illuminate a lot. Maybe just once, he’ll revisit Maybe Just Once.
>He hasn’t done anything new since Pretty Hate Machine.
As an electronic musician myself, I actually find myself agreeing with you - and I've been a fan of Trent since the beginning; lets say, envious of him from the very beginning, admittedly, also.
I think he has found a formula that brings industrial electronic synth-/picture- heavy art to the masses in a pretty clinical way.
I blame, as always in such cases, Trents' GAS. (Gear Acquisition Syndrome)
The degree to which an electronic musician sanitizes their gear, and actually more to the point: how often they do it, heavily maintains my interest in them, as a fan and as a musician.
Electronic artists who treat every single album as a chance to wipe the slate and plug in new things, are favoured in my camp. I especially like it when things go backwards and forwards - i.e. albums don't just keep getting Better Than Before™.
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 can't remember which album it was, perhaps "With Teeth," or the mentioned "Ghosts I-IV," when Trent Reznor offered the GarageBand files for the album. I thought it was amazing for an artist to offer their work up for people to remix and view, as long as they weren't profiting off of it. I've done the same with my artwork over the years, hoping that someone would come along and collab or "remix" my art into something new and interesting. I don't do promotion, so it hasn't occurred, but the idea was inspired by NIN and I think it's an amazing idea that can really build a community.
As an early teen when Broken came out, and I happened to be connected to some people into the 90's emerging industrial scene (not to take away from earlier scenes), NIN has always been a huge inspiration and got me into the grittier side of metal music.
> I've done the same with my artwork over the years, hoping that someone would come along and collab or "remix" my art into something new and interesting. I don't do promotion, so it hasn't occurred, but the idea was inspired by NIN and I think it's an amazing idea that can really build a community.
You know, right this second I am listening to a MIDI recreation of the soundtrack to a very obscure German Atari ST puzzle game from '84. Something somebody recreated where I would be surprised if more than 500 people in the world ever heard the original.
Even though you might never learn of it, given the vast number of people out there, it is entirely likely that what you did already touched somebody out there. You do not need to have built a community in order to have done something of significance.
Sorry to get back to you so long after you posted, but I really appreciate your comment! Also a huge fan of Atari computers (I learned my first programming on my dad's Atari 130XE 8-bit around 1990, quite a while after it went out of popularity).
And you're not going to plug yourself I certainly will: Appreciate your work on the NIN Hotline all these years and everything else you've done/added to the community.
> Rumor has it that Trent Reznor himself uploaded material to The Pirate Bay,
You'd certainly know better than I would but I feel like I recall Rob Sheridan confirming that in one of his interviews years later (not that there was really any doubt).
In 2006 there was a message posted by him in the forums that was: "This one is a guilt-free download. (shhhh - I didn’t say that out loud). If you know what I’m talking about, cool."
At the same time a user on TPB named "seed0" uploaded:
- A previously unreleased, professionally produced, expanded DVD version of Closure
- The full Broken movie in DVD quality (which had never leaked - the low-quality leaked versions that had circulated for yeas were missing part of it)
- 3 "The Definitive NIN" collections - which included some things that were difficult to find otherwise. (And today there are official playlists/collections by the same "Definitive NIN" name on the streaming platforms).
Maybe more but those are the most notable things I recall until all the pro-shot concert footage from the Lights in the Sky Tour got released to the fans to play with a few years later - most prominently turned into the "Another Version of the Truth - The Gift".
Not that there was any doubt, and while I don't feel like digging through all the interviews/AMAs I am almost certain that Rob Sheridan (creative director at the time) confirmed years later that the "leaks" were directly from the NIN camp.
Dave Matthews Band similarly cultivates the fan recordings.
https://antsmarching.org/ forum has hundreds, maybe thousands of show recordings. Often multiple for each night. They make their own official Soundboard releases that fans still purchase, but their stewardship of fan audio capture is commendable.
It's still technically illegal. And I wouldn't be surprised if there's a tacit Don't Ask, Don't Tell understanding in the community between artists and recorders. Even when individual recorders are known by the community and artists, keeping the pretense of anonymity might be important to preserving and protecting the scene.
It's really up to the artists. Many are surprisingly cool with it, though there are a few notable exceptions (i.e. Prince). Sounds like the artist in this particlar case gave their blessing.
Many bands (like GD and Phish) specifically note in their rider that venues must allow and provide space for tapers to bring their rigs in.
A sibling comment in this thread pointed out my project Relisten[0], which now has over 4,000 bands who have given explicit permission for people to tape, record, and share their concerts non-commercially. We've been operating our FOSS platform for 12 years, and most of the audio is hosted by Archive.org. I can't tell you how many bands have begged us to add them to our platform.
Prince had intense business instincts, not just for becoming a vertically integrated multi-instrumental composer manager, bandleader and of course prodigious artist. Its rumored that to ruin the market demand for his bootleggers, Prince started his own sockpuppet bootleg label, that eventually released over four hundred CDs of content. Concerts, studio alternate cuts, and of course After-Shows. That label is curiously named Sabotage.
Whether the rumor is true or not, I can't confirm. What I can tell you is it's an amazing soundboard quality collection of his work product that I'm still not all the way through exploring after it briefly circulated among fans for a brief moment shortly after his death.
> though there are a few notable exceptions (i.e. Prince)
There was an episode of "What's Happening" when Rerun gets in trouble for bootlegging a Doobie Brothers concert, does anyone remember? It aired when I was a kid and now I somehow still feel guilty when I listen to bootlegs.
Yup, just remembered around ’99 I bumped into “Rerun” in full costume dancin’ for a small crowd in the parking lot of a Sugar Hill Gang concert in Santa Monica. Didn’t carry a camera in those days, as they weren’t allowed inside anyway. :-P
> The lead singer caught my eye and gave me a wide grin
Daft Punk doesn't have a singer and unless it was a very early show they wouldn't have seen them smile. Most big beat shows wouldn't have a dedicated vocalist. I'd guess Underworld or Prodigy, but lean toward Underworld.
Haha, I can relate. Dabbled both with live recording (using a Sony PCM-M1 and a pair of very unobtrusive capsule mikes if the venue and band didn't have an enlightened recording policy, a DA-P1 and a pair of 416s if they did) and photograpy (mostly a Nikon F3 and a 105mm f/2.5).
I got VERY good at quickly rewinding a film roll and slipping it in the hands of a nearby friend in case security spotted me and wanted to nick my film. Always had a handful of empty film rolls to give up (seemingly reluctantly)
Worst scare I had was when taping Ray Charles at a jazz festival in Norway c.2000, methinks. Well into the show, he exclaims that some ass is taping his show, and he's not too happy about it. Starts explaining he's not going to play on until he's got that tape in his hands!
I glance around, rather nervously, but noone is heading for me - so I just keep recording, hoping that someone else is on the hook. Lo and behold, moments later a stage hand comes on stage with what appeared to be a broadcast video tape, giving it to a triumphant Ray Charles who sits down and starts playing again. Phew!
I hope you told them to stop. I always do. And that's not out of any copy infringement morals or anything, but of course out of a personal enjoyment infringement. ;-)
Yeah, I get that :)
But at the same time, it’s interesting how people react differently.
Some want the moment only for themselves, others want to capture it.
Nope. By disturbing all the people around you with a bright screen, you prevent them from capturing the real concert right now they want to see without a flickering screen in front of them.
And personally I can record, or enjoy the real moment.
But most people who record with their crappy smartphones probably just want to get the virtual recognition after they shared their videos, they were there, "like", great. But no one I know, actually watches shaky crappy smartphone concert recordings.
I talked to a big Grateful Dead fan the other day and he told me that they had special areas setup for anybody who wanted to record. They were happy to let people share.
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...
I've only heard it in a gambling context which is why I was confused. I was briefly on a UK gambling platform and they referred to themselves as punters.
"interesting, so when a fellow is taken up by the cops, and he says "thers no punt, im telling you truth", is that unfamiliar?"
Yes it is unfamiliar - it is unlikely that anyone in the UK has accidentally said that.
"i have a lot of different nationalities partaking of my wilderness lodge, and a lot of the younger english ones use punt/play/burn/scam as equivalent."
Given you have a dislike of capitals, I'll hazard a guess at your age (but not tell you). Kids here (UK) don't use words like that, says Granddad! I get a capital G because I say so.
If I had to guess, I've probably replied to a shit AI sigh
Great project, but it has an absolutely TERRIBLE UI. Please, if you love audio enough to put in the 95% of effort to get the files to the web, don't let everyone down with an atrocious interface to actually access those files.
Please, get someone who knows about usability or building web UIs to help you!
Archive.org always made puzzling UI choices, not really sure why, but its a long running trend thats not likely to change. Such that for larger Band repos, fans stepped in and made their own front ends:
Clearly this tape stash is worthy of similar treatment.
Also of note for live music fans and collectors: Legendary Long Island Radio Station WLIR Live Show Archives:
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..)