(TV) great l.a. times article on live show filesharing

[robin dunn <rdunnrn@yahoo.com>]

who knew?  major news hits nail on the head.

r



August 8, 2005 

POP MUSIC

Setting the live music free Websites enable the
exchange of concert recordings, a practice that has
thrived around the Grateful Dead and doesn't bother
the music industry.
     
By Steve Hochman, Special to The Times

A decade after Jerry Garcia died of a heart attack
while at a drug rehabilitation facility on Aug. 9,
1995, the legacy he and the Grateful Dead left is
stronger than ever.

That's not so much a comment about the young fans who
follow such Dead-influenced "jam" bands as the String
Cheese Incident. Nor is the band's spirit to be found
in its full flower at Bonnaroo or other festivals
furthering the scene the Dead anchored in its heyday.
  
If you really want to find the legacy of the Dead and
its legion of Deadheads today, go online.

In recent months there's been an explosion on the
Internet of what used to be called tape trading. This
is not the illegal copying of commercially available
music that is being fought by the major record
companies. This is the free, generally legal exchange
of fan-made concert tapes, radio broadcasts and
material that was never officially released  by the
Dead and just about anybody else.

It's a world that is growing daily at an exponential
rate  and has its foundation in the community of
tapers and traders that initially coalesced around and
was nurtured by Garcia and the Grateful Dead.

"The Dead was the real forerunner," says Brewster
Kahle, digital librarian of Internet Archive
(www.archive.org), which features a Live Music Archive
section for concert recordings. "The idea was you 
sell some things, you give some things away, and that
balance really personified the Grateful Dead. They
started a model."

The Live Music Archive's catalog of recordings just
passed 25,000, up from 20,000 in February and half
that figure in March 2004. About a tenth of those are
of Grateful Dead shows, and the bulk of the rest are
from bands that share the loose jam aesthetic but not
all. 
The list of performers represented runs to more than
1,000 and ranges from aggressive Texas rock outfit And
You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead to Billy
Corgan's short-lived Zwan.

Such other sites as Dimeadozen and the Traders' Den
offer a full spectrum of selections. There's
everything from obscure jazz dates from the '50s to
major rock concerts that happened just a couple of
days ago. Want to download Cream's Royal Albert Hall
reunion shows 
from May? A vintage 1969 concert by the same band?
They're there. Bruce Springsteen from the '70s? Easy.
Arcade Fire at Lollapalooza last month? Yours for the
taking. This isn't limited to rock bands with cult
followings either. You'll find Mariah Carey and Ashlee

Simpson concerts, and videos as well as audio
recordings.

These aren't the sites where you might find the new
Mike Jones album or other commercial releases without
paying. These are the places for people coveting music
that can't be bought.

Nothing illustrates the phenomenon more clearly,
though, than the fact that when the White Stripes
played the San Diego Street Scene on July 29, a
recording of the show was posted on a download site 
before midnight  before many people who saw the show
even got home.

"That's great," says White Stripes manager Ian
Montone, himself a Grateful Dead fan. "I love it when
people come in and tape and the shows take on an
additional life when fans trade like that, when it's
talked about and people can study the nuances of the
shows. It 
adds to the lore and history."

In fact, Montone says that the band has fan taping to
thank for preserving at least one special part of the
band's history  when Jack White joined Bob Dylan for
an encore at the latter's 2004 show in Detroit.

"Thank goodness someone taped that, because otherwise
we wouldn't have it," he says.

The Recording Industry Assn. of America, the music
industry's lobbying organization that staunchly
opposes illegal downloading, piracy and the sale of
bootleg recordings, says that it supports this kind of
music trading as long as the artists approve.

Dan Healy, longtime concert and studio producer for
the Dead, was one of the strongest advocates within
the Dead organization not just to allow taping but to
encourage it  resulting in their concerts being known
for the seas of microphones on poles in a special 
section right in front of the sound board. Fans would
then keep in touch through mailing lists and
newsletters, exchanging tapes of the various concerts.
The current cyberspace explosion is a fulfillment 
of the kind of community spirit Garcia stood for, he
says.

"The more lines that are open, the more people will
talk," says Healy. "That's a figure of speech, but
what it means is the more readily transmutable the
stuff is, the more people that always wanted to swap
and trade will do it. The more conversations, the more
swapping of music the better. If anything it makes it
more 
special. It's like love  the more you use it, the
stronger it gets"

And it is a community, or perhaps many interlocking
communities, each with its own set of rules and
ethics. Policies vary greatly from site to site. Some
are anything-goes, but the ones that adhere most to
the spirit of the Dead have strict regulations
prohibiting 
anything commercially available or from artists who
have not authorized such trading. The Traders' Den is
among the latter.

"Nothing that is available commercially is allowed in
any way, period," says one of the Traders' Den's
administrators, who asked that he be identified only
by his screen name, bill_kate. "There are a few bands
that have expressed certain restrictions on how and
what 
can be traded. We respect these wishes."

Brian Wilson is among the several dozen performers
whose name appears on a "banned" list used by many
sites' administrators. His views, though, were shaped
not by circulation of concert tapes but of
unauthorized releases that pieced together unfinished
elements of 
his long-delayed "Smile" project, which he finally
completed and released himself last year.

" 'Smile' was one of the most-bootlegged albums for
many years," says Jean Sievers, Wilson's co-manager.
"It wasn't a finished work and it wasn't what he
wanted, and he was upset that people were taking those
tapes and spreading his unfinished work over the
globe."

Other rules that are widely followed, at least on the
sites most in line with the Dead-spurred taping
community, include asking users to put music files in
forms with the highest possible audio fidelity, 
using "lossless" formats such as FLAC or SHNN rather
than compressing the data to lower-fidelity MP3 files.
Posters are also asked to provide as much information
as possible about the sources of the recording and, if
known, equipment used to record in the first place.

But one rule is most adamantly stated by
administrators and users alike: The music is not to be
sold.

"There is no money changing hands," says Kahle. "This
was the ethos back in the day  you couldn't even
charge for the cassette you dubbed music onto. People
really stuck to that. What was interesting to me was
the level of labor and love put in by everyone
involved."

Luther Dickinson of the North Mississippi Allstars (a
band whose spirited blues-rooted shows are common in
trading circles) says that, over the years, bootlegs 
whether bought in stores or traded  played an
important role in his music education.

"There's a bootleg film of the Allman Brothers," says
the guitarist. "Something else I collected over the
years is Bob Marley live stuff. That moves me more
than even his regular records. And Jimi Hendrix, of
course! Live Hendrix!"

Dickinson himself has not experienced the Internet
side of this  he doesn't own a computer. But fans
have routinely given him tapes and CDs they've made of
his band's concerts.

"I have a collection of tapes people have given me,
and to me that makes the 21 hours of the day that's
spent off stage worthwhile," he says. "People care and
have documented what we do and it makes it
worthwhile."

In a twist, although the easy connections have
increased availability of unofficial releases, they
have pretty much killed the profiteering that long
went on in that world, a form of piracy that has long
been fought by the music business.

ICE magazine, a monthly that targets collectors, has
long chronicled the "gray area" of bootlegging and
says that the boom time for Internet sharing has
brought sad times for that black market's
profit-minded members  and a much harder hit than
that anything the "real" music business is suffering
because of bootlegging.

"There's no question that the wind has been taken out
of the financial sails of the bootleg world by this
free exchange," editor Pete Howard says. "Bootleg CDs
used to be pressed in the thousands, if not tens of
thousands, for each title. Now, though it's funny and 
ironic to hear the manufacturers moan and groan, no
more than 500 copies is usual."

Meanwhile, the Grateful Dead continues to balance
commerce and freedom. Despite so many recordings
readily available on the Internet, the official
releases of live albums continue at a steady 
pace, with the "Dick's Picks" series now standing at
three dozen titles alone, complemented by other live
releases, as well as a newer program of Garcia solo
concert recordings. Many make the argument that one
feeds the other.

"We've really hit on something with this community,"
says Internet Archive's Kahle. "And yeah, it all came
from the Grateful Dead, and it will give them a long
life. They're still selling stuff, and there are young
kids involved. It is relevant." 

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