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marco:

Phish — Fluffhead, 2009/12/03 at Madison Square Garden (buy)

This was my favorite performance from the show I attended last week. The last three minutes, in particular, are excellent.

One of the interesting benefits of being a Phish fan is that you can download official, legal, high-quality*, DRM-free soundboard recordings of nearly every show they perform from here for reasonable prices — and they’re typically available within a few hours of the end of the show.

I was able to download this concert by the time I got home from attending it.**

The band probably makes a decent amount of money from these sales. The rest of the music industry should take notice: this is a great idea. (…for bands whose concerts actually sound different from the albums and each other.)

* I transcoded this MP3 down to 92 kbps ABR to be a more reasonable size for streaming. The actual sound quality is better. They even offer FLAC and 24/48 FLAC-HD for a bit more money if you’re into that sort of thing.

** But I waited until I could buy all three nights — that’s 66 songs, over 8 hours — for $27. I’m lucky to get one 45-minute album every two years from most other bands that I like. It’s good to be a Phish fan.

I’m by no means a Phish fan (having never heard them before today), but it’s initiatives like that that will help musicians to make a decent living. Way Out West are another band doing their own thing - when their latest album came out, you could get immediate digital FLAC/ALAC/320 kbit MP3 downloads, with the CD to follow for a small fee, and optionally a nice t-shirt and a signed copy, all reasonably direct from the band. They offer reasonable-quality full track streams on the website, too.

I was impressed with Nine Inch Nails’ recent releases for much the same reason, and I’ve got into a few bands and DJs lately because they’ve been providing a decent sample of their work.

The labels’ approach of “lock down and persecute” just doesn’t work.