You might have Pro Tools integrated into your FOH console, but you may not be the only one legally recording the show. In a twist on the Grateful Dead’s well-known encouragement of fans taping their live shows, modern rockers MGMT are inviting their own legions to do the same, but with a nod to the vicissitudes of contemporary music legalities. The band opened a “fan taping section” at their shows in Atlanta, Chicago and Brooklyn late last year, announcing it via their website but specifically asking that tapers first register in addition to purchasing tickets for their shows.
MGMT laid down some clear guidelines. “The taping section capacities will be limited and registration won’t guarantee space in the section… No soundboard or power feeds are provided… Taping is limited to audio-only, using only microphones. You will be allowed to bring one recording device and one microphone into the venue. Wireless receivers are strictly prohibited.”
Most auspiciously, the band asserted copyright over anything that took place in the recording ghetto: “MGMT and/or its record company reserves ownership over all recordings and the intellectual property embodied thereon (including, without limitation, any and all musical compositions).” They further specified that all recordings could be used only for personal enjoyment and not sold, though they could be traded between fans on digital or other media, but could not be posted online for downloading or streaming. Finally, “Selling or commercializing any recording is illegal and will jeopardize taping privileges for everyone.” That’s what Jerry Garcia might have sounded like had he become a high school principal.
A Good Idea
MGMT’s action puts live and recorded music back on the same plate again. While the Dead’s encouragement of recording of concerts by fans has become part of the culture for the legion of jam bands that followed them, it also took a substantially more commercial turn a decade or so ago, when a number of companies offered on-site, professional-quality recordings of shows that would be available as audiences left the venue, on CDs, flash drives or by download. On paper, it seemed like a great idea, to the point where Live Nation acquired one of these vendors and tried to scale it across their industrial reach. Unfortunately, it never became more than a widely scattered niche market product, losing traction along with most other ideas that were paired with any kind of physical media in an increasingly virtual world. Today, smartphones replace the Bic lighters that were once held aloft at concerts, and shaky videos with god-awful audio are rampant on YouTube.
If near-realtime concert recordings proved to be less successful as commercial products, does encouraging fans to make their own recordings serve a useful purpose? Yes, and in several ways. First, as the Dead taught the industry, letting fans take a piece of an event back home with them strengthens the emotional bond between fan and band. That this memento is something they recorded themselves plays nicely to the current attraction of craft-made products. In addition, considering that the cell phone has spawned an infinitely deep ocean of crap recordings, steering would-be recordists into a well-positioned area that’s more conducive to making a somewhat better recording is going to help counter that by creating a pool of somewhat better-sounding recordings.
The one thing you can always do to make something nice look even nicer is to surround it with things that are less nice. A fan-made recording of an artist’s live performance done under better circumstances is going to work in that artist’s favor as it circulates through the Internet, burnished by comparisons to all those tinny mono tracks out there. To further underscore that point, creating a formal environment for people to make recordings at concerts encourages them to use slightly better equipment and techniques, resulting in even better-sounding results.
Bringing It All Back Home
The reality is that the value of recorded music has been on a downward slide for over a decade, while the value of the live performance has more or less held its own but has hardly seen any significant long-term growth in recent years. Pairing them in a commercial configuration has already proven unsuccessful. But in an environment when social media remains a crucial transactional element, the idea of carving out a recording space for fans resonates well. It’s the ultimate engagement tactic for an ephemeral age — a takeaway from the event that was crafted by the fan himself. I could envision a few companies leveraging this in other ways, like an ad in Rolling Stone for the Tascam DR-05 handheld recorder and how it “brings the show back home with you.”
It’s not going to save the music business. However, it might add another small facet to a picture that’s being painted, a brush stroke at a time, by a thousand forces all trying to figure out what the business of music is supposed to look like when it comes out the other side of this dark and confusing tube it’s been in since Napster reared its head 15 years ago.
There was a point when we could have said that live music’s fate was not inextricably linked to that of recorded music. For some time, it’s almost considered dogma that live music would be the redemption of the industry, with recorded tracks relegated to loss-leader status. But in the last year or so, the numbers on both sides of the divide indicate that music in general is still a tender economic area. So there’s really little to lose by green-lighting a sanctioned taping area, and lots of good will to be gained.
