You’re all aware of the oil glut. Great if you have gas tanks to fill, not so much if you have retirement accounts loaded with petroleum stocks. Overcapacity is all around us — we’ve had gluts of airline seats and houses in the past. Today, we have surfeits of airliners, copper and PhD’s in the news. As with all shortages and surpluses, there are winners and losers, new opportunities and missed chances for every miscalculation of supply and demand.
We may be looking at a new kind of overabundance these days — or more precisely — an extension of an existing one. Just as the personal recording revolution that began in the late 1980’s was a big driver of the slew of recorded music that today makes it so hard to find gems in what’s become a sea of swill, we now also have an ocean of live recordings swimming around us. It’s remarkable how much recorded music is being stockpiled by touring bands on the road, recording every show (because they can) in the form of everything from multi-tracks to two-mixes off the FOH board.
These tracks are being used for a number of purposes, including professional ones like virtual sound checks, but a huge chunk of them are being offered as paid and bonus downloads from artists’ websites. As a fan-engagement tool, they’re wonderful, offering a level of intimacy and immediacy that other merchandise cannot. But at the same time, this expanding river of live tracks might be doing to live music what the MP3 did to recorded music: polluting the quality of the larger ocean.
Is It Really Still Live?
Without mentioning names, it’s not hard to find artists’ websites from which you can download every show from three or four or more years’ worth of tours. What’s somewhat harder to find are sites where each of those tracks has received at least a minimum amount of polish, in terms of a coherent mix and appropriate processing and mastering. The inevitable raw edges of a live show are softened by our participation in it, either as a ticketholder and a performer. But re-listen to a recording of it in the harsh light of a day later, and its imperfections become quickly and annoyingly apparent. Fixing those imperfections takes time, something bands and mixers on the road don’t have a lot of. And besides, once a certain amount of post-production takes place, be it vocal tuning or remixing, a track is no longer strictly “live” anymore. There might be good reasons to make some live recordings widely available as soon as possible after a show, but doing so without some basic processing, these might end up working against whatever it is the artist is trying to accomplish. Unless, of course, the goal is simply to generate more revenue. Even then, that may work against them as a long-term strategy.
This Magic Moment?
“There’ll always be some great things that can be captured live at a show — some magic moment or a great solo by a guest artist — but that’s different from recording and putting out night after night of live recordings,” observes Joel Singer, a live broadcast mix specialist and an owner of Music Mix Mobile (M3), a leading remote-audio truck company. After years recording live music performances for LP’s and DVD’s, Singer has successfully established himself on the broadcast side. M3 regularly does telecasts including the Grammys, the ACMs and other award shows — but he nonetheless bemoans the decline in use of dedicated remote trucks for live music recording, not for its effects on the economics of live recording but for its sonic quality. “To put up six microphones around an arena and say you have a good audience image is laughable,” he snorts. “What it really sounds like is 15 people yelling in front of a shotgun mic.”
This is the MP3-ization, so to speak, of live music. McLuhan was right — the medium is the message. Once the context of attendance at the show is stripped away by the passage of time, what you’re left with is an often-too-vérité documentary of one night, now devoid of the romance of the moment of its creation but also without the sheen of some post-show TLC. Toss enough of these kinds of McNuggets out there and, after a while, even the most rabid of fan bases begin to sag under the sheer weight of them.
And that can be a dangerous trend at a time when live music has become the single biggest generator of revenue for the music business, and is the reason that 60- and 70-year-old artists book three-continent tours annually. The renaissance in vinyl and the attention recently being lavished on high-resolution audio formats underscores what has become a rising sense of dissatisfaction with the sound quality of recorded music on the part of consumers. The innate tiny-ness of the MP3 combined with the massive amount of music pouring out of laptop recording “studios” only stokes that disaffection.
When all that’s left is live music, why risk raising listeners’ ire by folding it into the brown paper taco of a highly compressed file? A poorly mixed, overly raw bit of a live show is just one more grain of sand on what was once a beach, but has since grown into a huge desert.
The trend to stockpiling live concert tracks is on the rise. Bruce Springsteen popped the cork on his new destination at live.brucespringsteen.net late last year. More to follow.
I expect that institutional artists like The Boss will have the time and the resources, not to mention the common sense, to place an appropriate value on properly processed concert files. They are, essentially, one more trophy room on the way to the rock ‘n’ roll equivalent of a presidential library. I’d also expect curation — after 40 years on the road, some nights will have been better than others. But I don’t have the same expectations for what’s sure to grow into a tsunami of concert archives in the near future from hundreds or even thousands of other sources. But in any event, get ready to duck. Incoming….
