[HN Gopher] Rare concert recordings are landing on the Internet ...
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Rare concert recordings are landing on the Internet Archive
Author : jrm-veris
Score : 461 points
Date : 2026-04-14 13:46 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (techcrunch.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (techcrunch.com)
| monooso wrote:
| A discussion from six days ago (same story, different source):
|
| https://apnews.com/article/aadam-jacobs-collection-concerts-...
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| Here's the discussion from 3 days ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47687443
|
| I was pleased to find some "They Might Be Giants" in the
| archive.
| tclancy wrote:
| Source article is more enjoyable
| http://blockclubchicago.org/2026/04/10/from-early-nirvana-to...
| bahmboo wrote:
| This should be the link. Thanks
| xnx wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47717957
| adfm wrote:
| Here's an article about The Sacramento Music Archive that's
| also worth checking out.
|
| https://www.kqed.org/arts/13979518/sacramento-music-archive-...
|
| Go out and support your local live music scene.
| pimlottc wrote:
| Really interesting to see how far this story has spread, I saw it
| in my Chicago groups first and now it's popped up in outlets all
| over the world. I guess it shows how nostalgic we are for an
| earlier time, both in music and internet culture.
| HelloUsername wrote:
| Previous discussion: "Volunteers turn a fan's recordings of 10K
| concerts into an online treasure trove"
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47687443 8-apr-2026 76
| comments
| alsetmusic wrote:
| This is one of the best things I've read about in a bit. It
| wasn't uncommon to buy marked-up (overpriced) bootlegs of live
| performances on CDs in the 90s. You never knew in advance if it'd
| be a quality recording or total garbage. We've lost that.
|
| I still love when one of my live bootlegs of Faith No More comes
| on with them doing (sometimes mocking) parodies of popular music
| (their rendition of Nothing Compares to You by Sinead OConnor has
| been in my head as I type this). When I got to see them in 2010
| (I think) they were true to form and played a bunch of short
| (reinterpretations) covers and it was one of the best aspects of
| the show. And I still have a Mr Bungle bootleg with them covering
| Existential Blues by Tom "T-Bone" Stankus (I always thought it
| was Doctor Demento's Wizard of Oz until just now when I looked it
| up).
|
| How would you even know about these awesome gems without bootlegs
| or access to see all their live shows? YouTube is less likely to
| capture an entire show than a clip, whereas the bootlegs were
| typically the full show. There are probably areas of the internet
| where this stuff gets shared and traded, but having it in my
| local music shop meant everyone had access without requiring
| special knowledge.
|
| I just did two searches, one Google and one Kagi, and neither
| turned up the FNM Nothing Compares to You. Who knows how many
| copies of it exist in the world. If my music library gets nuked,
| who will even know about it? I think I'm gonna start uploading my
| bootleg recordings of live shows to IA.
| kkkqkqkqkqlqlql wrote:
| If you really want to share it, how about torrenting it?
| CoffeeOnWrite wrote:
| IA makes the most sense in the spirit of preservation.
|
| Etree (https://www.etree.org/ ) is the longest running
| torrent site for tapes. It looks like only about 5% of the
| hundred thousand torrents have any seeders at all. Not sure
| how reliable requesting a seed is. I'd expect long tail stuff
| to get "effectively lost". Versus IA whose purpose and
| funding is preservation, in addition to sharing.
| HappMacDonald wrote:
| Etree is missing self-seed then. What if IA hosted torrents
| like Etree does but _also_ self-seeded the content?
|
| Thus they are encouraging amateur third parties to pick up
| some of the archival slack, that style of torrent could
| outlive IA in case anything happened to them, and it
| reduces some of their bandwidth costs
| charcircuit wrote:
| IA always does that. Every download page also links to a
| torrent. Is that not the same as what you want?
| Projectiboga wrote:
| This is a fun area, as the DMCA, for its flaws included a
| loophole for non-commercial distribution of live concert
| recordings. The only requirement is that it isn't an exact
| copy of a commercial release. I am not sure about the exact
| standards, as live albums often aren't the entire concert.
| Here are some other sites where people share these tapes.
|
| http://www.thetradersden.org/
|
| https://sugarmegs.org/
|
| http://www.dimeadozen.org/
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| Mike Patton loves pop music. Those covers were most likely not
| mocking anything. I love me some Faith No More but haven't
| heard them cover Nothing Compares 2 U (which is actually a
| Prince tune). I'll have to check it out.
|
| EDIT: You weren't kidding. I can't find a cover of it. Please!
| Share it!
| alsetmusic wrote:
| See sibling comment:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47768467
| acomjean wrote:
| FNM's cover of the Commodore's Easy is both ridiculous and
| sublime. Man they can play.
|
| There was a good bbc show of theirs floating around on
| YouTube. The music is so intense that I feel these quieter
| pieces give one a chance to catch one's breath.
| tuumi wrote:
| I remember this too. Those bootlegs were $30 each and my friend
| group was really into Pearl Jam. If I remember correctly a lot
| of these were made out of Italy. In college (maybe late 90s) I
| somehow managed to come up with $500 to buy a CD burner. I
| would make copies of these bootlegs and sell to friends for
| $10. I couldn't keep up and made my money back to pay for the
| burner relatively quickly. I think I was even able to find some
| to download then burning saving me the $30 at the record store.
| I made my own funny CD covers. Once I got my money back for the
| CD burner I just asked for the cost of the Cds. Great trip down
| memory lane.
| frereubu wrote:
| > You never knew in advance if it'd be a quality recording or
| total garbage.
|
| I once bought a VHS recording of a Lemonheads gig after seeing
| them at the Glastonbury festival, guess it must have been
| around 1993, and in visual terms it was absolutely unwatchable
| - the camera wasn't still for a second - but probably pretty
| representative of what it was like to be there.
| roskelld wrote:
| Are you certain Faith No More did the cover? There's certainly
| a Mr. Bungle version [0] from a San Francisco gig in 1990. I
| remember grabbing this from the Bungle Fever FTP site back in
| around '99. I'd often download the bootlegs, burn them to audio
| CD and print out a cover of the gig poster if one was
| available.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTfSrUThyDk
| alsetmusic wrote:
| That's exactly the one I have! No surprise that it was
| mislabeled. Same vocalist, so that tended to happen before
| broadband was widely available. I even downloaded a song
| (Nebula) from Incubus's SCIENCE that was misattributed to Mr
| Bungle. To be fair, the singer plausibly could have been said
| to be doing a Mike Patton imitation.
|
| Now that I think more about it, I must have got the track
| from a P2P service / network. But I had a bajillion Nirvana
| bootlegs when I was an adolescent. Thinking of the misnaming
| phenomenon, the hidden track (from Nevermind) was alternately
| named either "I Hate Myself and I Want to Die" or "I Love
| Myself and I Want to Live" on those live performances (after
| Cobain's suicide). 1990s and no or limited internet, so it
| was whatever someone decided.
|
| Thanks for surfacing the track so readers can hear it! It's
| one of my favorites.
| cyanbane wrote:
| Some stuff I snagged the other day when it was posted:
|
| Elf Power Live at Lounge Ax 1998-04-25
| https://archive.org/details/ajc01382_elf-power-1998-04-25
|
| Fountains Of Wayne Live at The Vic Theatre 2003-11-19
| https://archive.org/details/ajc00691_fountains-of-wayne-2003...
|
| Fugazi Live at State Theatre on 1991-08-06
| https://archive.org/details/ajc02237_fugazi1991-08-06.ajcpro...
|
| Godspeed You! Black Emperor Live at Lounge Ax on 1999-09-16
| https://archive.org/details/ajc02676_gybe1999-09-16.ajcproje...
|
| Iron & Wine Live at Abbey Pub 2004-07-02 (Late show)
| https://archive.org/details/ajc01329_iron-wine-2004-07-02.la...
|
| Josh Rouse Live at Schubas Tavern 2004-04-26
| https://archive.org/details/ajc01208_josh-rouse-2004-04-26
|
| Midnight Oil Live at Cabaret Metro 1988-04-30
| https://archive.org/details/ajc02792_midnightoil1988-04-30
|
| Neutral Milk Hotel Live at Lounge Ax 1997-05-01
| https://archive.org/details/ajc00789_neutralmilkhotel1997-05...
|
| OK Go Live at Belmont-Sheffield Music Festival 2003-05-31
| https://archive.org/details/ajc01120_ok-go-2003-05-31
|
| Pavement Live at Lounge Ax 1992-06-12
| https://archive.org/details/ajc00811_pavement1992-06-12
|
| Polyphonic Spree Live at Metro on 2003-10-07
| https://archive.org/details/ajc01050-PolyphonicSpree2003-10-...
|
| Ratatat Live at Abbey Pub 2004-05-14
| https://archive.org/details/ajc01220_ratatat-2004-05-14
|
| Rogue Wave Live at Schubas Tavern on 2005-01-30
| https://archive.org/details/ajc01227_roguewave2005-01-30.ajc...
|
| Super Furry Animals Live at Abbey Pub 2002-04-19
| https://archive.org/details/ajc01144_super-furry-animals-200...
|
| The Decemberists Live at Intonation Fest on 2005-07-17
| https://archive.org/details/ajc00642_decemberists2005-07-17....
|
| The Folk Implosion Live at Schubas Tavern 2000-02-29 (Late show)
| https://archive.org/details/ajc00963_folk_implosion_2000-02-...
|
| The Shins Live at Schubas Tavern 2001-08-24
| https://archive.org/details/ajc01131_the_shins_2001-08-24
| mesofile wrote:
| Fugazi enjoyers should also know about their own very extensive
| archive of live shows
|
| https://dischord.com/fugazi_live_series
| LargeWu wrote:
| For those interested, Relisten is another repository of live
| concert recordings. It skews heavily towards improvisational
| music, ie jambands, but there's some indie rock on there as well.
|
| https://relisten.net/
| bigfishrunning wrote:
| Cool site, thanks! it seems to also be backed by archive.org, i
| wonder if there's a way to move more stuff into that interface.
| the nirvana performance in the article isn't there for
| instance.
| ClifReeder wrote:
| One of the authors/maintainers of Relisten posted that they
| are working on adding the Aadam Jacbos collection -
| https://bsky.app/profile/saewitz.com/post/3mjawvvklls2v
| switz wrote:
| Oh hey, it's me! Happy to answer any questions
|
| We landed an update on mobile last week that brought all
| 4,000 artists with a "collection" onto Relisten. That'll be
| coming to the web and sonos shortly as well.
|
| We've been discussing the Aadam Jacob's collection with the
| archivists for some time. It comes with its own unique
| UX[0] and data constraints so we've been iterating on that
| and waiting for a critical mass of uploads before tackling
| it. We're getting closer though.
|
| I agree with most of the sentiment in these comments.
| Archive and share non-comercially all the things!
|
| [0] it's not "one" artist so it requires some custom UI, it
| should be unified through a single Aadam Jacob's
| collection, and it has a unique data path/structure on
| Archive.org relative to other collections
| nour833 wrote:
| Yeah but you know DMCA may intervene to delete it if they are
| copyrighted (as it happened with many media content before)
| lokar wrote:
| Tangent idea: musicians should record every live show, and then
| put it on a streaming service, only for people who bought tickets
| to the show (possibly for an extra small fee on the ticket).
| Extra revenue for the artist, and a cool benefit for the fan (the
| liver performance you attended).
| RajT88 wrote:
| There's a niche market for this. Whoever builds it will make a
| good living, I feel.
| natios wrote:
| why not have it accessible to everyone so collectors can have a
| field day with it!
| dewey wrote:
| Are you working for free too?
| xd1936 wrote:
| Available for everyone to purchase*, not just the local
| venue ticket holders.
| lokar wrote:
| I think (I could be wrong), that relatively few people
| would value the recordings from every show on a tour.
| But, many more people would value somewhat exclusive
| access to the recording for a show they attended in
| person.
| maweaver wrote:
| As someone else mentioned above, with jam bands each
| performance is unique, and people definitely value
| getting access to every show. For bands repeating the
| same set as identically as possible on a tour, not sure
| how much it matters which performance you listen to.
| Although some people might be into it, for the "I was
| there" novelty factor.
| ClifReeder wrote:
| This is very much a among jam bands - see https://www.nugs.net/
| lokar wrote:
| That looks like just a subscription thing, right?
|
| I saw David Byrne last week, during checkout for the ticket I
| would probably have paid an extra $10 to get access to the
| recording of that show.
| epiccoleman wrote:
| It's not just a subscription thing, you can purchase
| individual shows ala bandcamp too.
|
| But yeah, jam bands have really embraced this more than any
| other category of artist - it's quite common even among
| low-mid tier jam bands that every single show ends up on
| Nugs. These bands are often pretty friendly to recordists
| too (a recent show I was at has two recordings on the IA as
| well as the Nugs version. Everyone's happy!)
| tclancy wrote:
| Mike Doughty used to sell burned CDs of the show at the
| merch table (afterwards in case anyone was worried he was
| using some Is Chicago, Is Not Chicago technique to violate
| the space time continuum) back in the aughts.
| hardtke wrote:
| Phish gives people a code that lets them access the show
| they attend on livephish.com without a subscription. You
| can subscribe and get access to all of the shows. I think
| livephish.com is run by and/or shares the same platform as
| nugs.net but it's a different subscription.
| petetnt wrote:
| Fugazi released almost 900 shows on CD in the early 2000's,
| costing 5 bucks a piece. Some of them are available on their
| Bandcamp page these days too https://fugazi.bandcamp.com/.
| ilamont wrote:
| Not only that, you can listen to many of them for free from
| the Fugazi online concert archive:
| https://dischord.com/fugazi_live_series
|
| (See my comment upthread about Fugazi and the unexpected
| encounter with Ian MacKaye after I stumbled upon an obscure
| YouTube recording)
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47769059
| tracker1 wrote:
| At the last "That Damn Show" in Phoenix (2001 iirc), a couple
| of the bands were burning and selling CDs from that show. Was
| kind of nice/wild to see.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| Why restrict it to ticket holders? I'm sure bands don't want to
| leave money on the table either. Metallica surely doesn't:
| https://www.metallica.com/store/live-metallica-cds/
| 101008 wrote:
| I love going to concerts and I tried pitching this to
| producers, bands, etc. They just don't care unfortunately.
|
| My mindset was: They already did most of the work, just
| exporting the audio (that already exists!) would give them
| extra income. Could be a subscription service, or pay per
| album, or even for free (it's a marketing channel).
|
| Some bands don't want their live recording out there (multiple
| reasons: from errors during the live show, or to keep the
| experience exclusive, or they think some people won't want to
| go to see them live if they already can listen to it). There is
| also the aspect of "If we release it for free or in the
| platform, we can't never make an actual live recording album",
| which could make some sense.
|
| For years I dreamt about this "Netflix for unreleased live
| concerts" platform but I couldn't reach anything. Maybe I am
| really bad seller, and I just needed help from someone with
| more experience with the industry.
|
| I ended up doing this unofficially for my faovurite artist,
| with the help of friends and collectors, uploading bootlegs
| (sometimes amateur recordings, sometimes board sound
| recording), and catalogued so you can search for all the plays
| of a particular song, or an album, how many times this song was
| played, if there was a guest, filter by country, city, year,
| etc, etc.
| pimlottc wrote:
| There is also the legitimate view that a concert is a
| physical, ephemeral experience shared by the people in the
| room on the night. That is it fleeting is part of its beauty,
| in the same manner as live theater.
|
| Which is not to say no concert should ever be recorded, but I
| could understand why it wouldn't be a priority for some
| artists.
| dhosek wrote:
| Nihil sub sola novum est.
|
| This has been done. Peter Gabriel, for example, did this on one
| of his tours (I think Back to Front, but I'm too lazy to dig it
| up). The California Guitar Trio also experimented with it.
|
| I'm guessing the fact that it's not a widespread practice is
| that the return on investment (and we're talking strictly the
| additional costs beyond simply recording the show) didn't
| justify the effort.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > This has been done.
|
| Yeah, I've been to low double-figure gigs[0] where they were
| selling soundboard CDs shortly after the gig. If I'm not
| mistaken, a bunch of them were being done by the same company
| (but an internet search is unproductive.)
|
| [0] In London, I want to say late 2000s, early 2010s?
| buildsjets wrote:
| King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard (yes really) do this, but
| not just for people who buy tickets to the show. They have 444
| concerts up on Archive.org for free to all.
|
| https://archive.org/details/KingGizzardAndTheLizardWizard
|
| Plenty of other artists have free concert archives at
| https://archive.org/details/etree
| kanemcgrath wrote:
| since they have been doing orchestral performances, getting
| to hear the orchestral versions of their old songs has been
| amazing.
| soneil wrote:
| Sigur Ros have a surprising number of shows on their ftp,
| which is delightfully retro.
| lordfosco wrote:
| There was a German startup called Bleecker Street [1] about a
| decade ago that did exactly that. They toured with artists like
| Chris Rea, Simple Minds, and Mark Knopfler, tapping directly
| into the FOH desk at each venue. They would mix the audio live,
| even adding the ambient noise of the crowd to capture the live
| feeling.
|
| Right after the show, you could buy fancy looking USB sticks,
| designed with unique elements of the artists, pre-loaded with
| the recording of the set you had just heard.
|
| I still have a guitar-shaped USB stick from a Mark Knopfler
| show at a small venue in a tiny town in southern Germany.
| Honestly, it's a far better souvenir than any picture I could
| have taken.
|
| [1]:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20150205231438/http://www.bleeck...
| MilkLizard wrote:
| Metallica does or did this. I still have some mp3 of the shows
| I saw years ago.
| FatherOfCurses wrote:
| I wonder if a band could put together a live stream concert
| published to a private stream sent to a movie theater. A bunch
| of fans of the band could get together and have the concert
| experience with fellow fans but not have to pay as much as an
| in-person concert. Movie theaters would have another way to get
| people in the door.
| itintheory wrote:
| This definitely happens. Last time Dead & Company came to
| town, it was simulcast in the local movie theater. Tickets to
| the show were only available on a raffle basis since the
| venue didn't hold nearly enough people.
|
| Then again, the Dead were also pioneers of permitting and
| encouraging the bootleg scene.
| xoxxala wrote:
| I'm reading this article and Weird Al's _Don 't Download this
| Song_ pops up on random play. Did Microsoft add Copilot to Media
| Player or something?
|
| "Don't download this song (Don't do it, no, no) Even Lars Ulrich
| knows it's wrong (You can just ask him)"
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Windows, right? If so, that's your problem. Your computer is
| controlled by someone else.
|
| (Just being snarky btw lol)
| darknavi wrote:
| I enjoyed "live albums" a lot growing up.
|
| The Mark, Tom, and Travis show was always a blast to listen to
| with my friends.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mark,_Tom,_and_Travis_Show...!)
| dfxm12 wrote:
| HN thinks the exclamation point is punctuation and not part of
| the URL. Luckily wikipedia has a redirect already set up that
| will work:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Mark,_Tom,_an...
| nticompass wrote:
| This was one of the first - if not the first - CD I bought for
| myself, using my own (allowance) money! I was probably too
| young to listen to it, but blink-182 is my favorite band and I
| listened to this CD so many times that I pretty much memorized
| all the stupid banter between tracks.
|
| I also liked sharing certain tracks with my friends when they
| came over...
| tiahura wrote:
| There are so many concert recordings of awesome performances that
| sound like crap because they are audience tapes.
|
| Often before a performance recorded music is played and captured
| in the audience recordings.
|
| Would it be possible to train a model on an archive of these
| concert audience recordings of studio recordings paired with the
| original studio recordings to develop a system to "clean up"
| audience recordings?
| tracker1 wrote:
| Maybe... however, most bands tend to drift a LOT from the
| studio versions of songs while touring.
| tiahura wrote:
| I'm referring to the pre-concert, when they're just playing a
| mixtape of whatever through the board. Compare studio
| recording of whatever and the audience recording.
| reenorap wrote:
| I remember back in the early 90s I think on the internet when it
| was only accessible via my university, reading on a newsgroup
| about how people traded bootlegs from various concerts. People
| would mail cassette tapes around the country and would use double
| cassette recorders to make a copy of their bootleg and mail it
| back to people. It was definitely a different time
| dfxm12 wrote:
| There was lots of "tape trading" back then. Video too. Foreign
| TV shows, regional programming, etc. If not technically
| Internet material, i think this is certainly in the spirit of
| the Internet Archive.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tape_trading
| conductr wrote:
| Late 90s there were some great IRC channels for this. I was
| pretty active in one that revolved around a genre that I most
| enjoyed.
| criddell wrote:
| > he has to use anachronistic cassette decks to play the tapes,
| which get converted into digital files
|
| Anachronistic?
|
| It seems like a complicated way of saying "the tapes were
| digitized".
| FarmerPotato wrote:
| Yeah, anachronism means 'not belonging to the time period'. If
| you made a 1980s movie and had the protagonist transfer
| cassettes to a laptop via USB interface, THAT would be an
| anachronism.
|
| I think the author meant "old-fashioned" or "obsolete". Though
| using a cassette deck to read cassettes, geez, what else are
| you going to do? Build your own using an Arduino?
| rolph wrote:
| if you really want to hear a live performance, there seems to be
| a nudge from amazon lately.
|
| if your into providing music, dont default to a live version.
|
| some live recordings are good, you can actually hear the music,
| and the crowd is only noticble between songs.
|
| im thinking that an online archive of live concerts will only
| steepen this trend.
|
| im just going back to all my mp3 media more often nowadays [bcz i
| actually bought it mp3 versions, decades ago when you still
| could]
|
| that way i can hear music, instead of a bunch of people screaming
| over the music.
|
| now heres somthing else, maybe you remember that concert, you
| were there, you love hearing you and friends at the concert,
| maybe people who no longer live are still there. jimmy dean, rock
| on,
| tracker1 wrote:
| I have a friend that used to record a lot of concerts... a
| surprising number of bands would even let him plug into the panel
| to do so. IIRC, mostly using a digital tape recorder later
| transferred to computer over firewire in the late 90s and 00s.
| schwartzworld wrote:
| It's funny to think how much effort was put into preventing
| bootlegging, when now everything is being recorded all the time.
|
| The few bands that didn't care or even encouraged it reaped the
| benefits. I was a huge Ween fan in the 90s and bootlegged a show
| of theirs myself. Camera and recording devices were allowed and
| the result was a tremendous amount of live content available
| online. For some bands this might not matter, but they rarely
| played the same set list twice and often played songs differently
| from show to show. In the early internet days, there was more
| ween content online than you could ever hope to listen to.
| internet101010 wrote:
| Effort is still being put into it. Just this weekend YouTube
| put the 4K Coachella streams behind SABR. I could still get
| 1080p easily but 4K required some fanangling.
| acomjean wrote:
| As a student in the 90s I worked security for the student
| concert group on campus. We had to frisk people for Jello
| Briafa (Dead Kennedys) spoken word performance. I found a
| couple of tape decks, but those were allowed.
|
| They still put a lot of effort sometimes. I saw Dave Chapelle
| in NYC and they made us put our phones in these pouches which
| were unsealed on exiting the show.
| rigonkulous wrote:
| 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_..)
| erickhill wrote:
| I loved reading this with the still built-in caginess around
| all the identifying details. Just in case!
| whompyjaw wrote:
| What is a "punter"?
| stavros wrote:
| Customer/fan/concertgoer.
| nutjob2 wrote:
| In this case, an attendee to the concert.
|
| More generally someone on the buying/risk side of a
| transaction.
| rolph wrote:
| also common UK slang, for someone who constantly does things
| in the grey.
|
| to wit: scammer, scheister, player.
| gib444 wrote:
| That's incorrect. In British slang it means a
| customer/patron. In this context a fan/concertgoer
|
| (Source: I'm British)
| rolph wrote:
| interesting, so when a fellow is taken up by the cops,
| and he says "thers no punt, im telling you truth", is
| that unfamiliar?
|
| 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.
|
| i can see how they could merge, considering a colloquial
| "punt" [rugby/footall] as a maneuver with adverse risk.
| philposting wrote:
| Never heard of that usage (I'm also British).
| rolph wrote:
| could it be a cockney thing ?
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| Punt is a long gamble, most often used as part of "take a
| punt". As you say, probably related to football usage.
|
| I don't know if punter (as in, customer) is related. I
| suppose buying something is always a bit of a punt to
| some extent.
| rcxdude wrote:
| They are related, it seems. punter being gambler but
| evolving into general 'customer/member of the public'
| over time.
| tyrust wrote:
| Great story, but how are you going to say all that but not link
| to the recording?
| wahern wrote:
| 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.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| 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.
| euroderf wrote:
| > the record industry does everything it can to consolidate
| everything.
|
| Financialization ? Productize, promote, push ?
| tempaccount5050 wrote:
| 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.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| 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.
| tempaccount5050 wrote:
| 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.
| volkl48 wrote:
| > 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).
| leviathant wrote:
| 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.
|
| Concert photos, wallpapers, and other photos are _still_ up
| on Flickr:
| https://www.flickr.com/photos/nineinchnails/albums
|
| And the NIN camp utilized Vimeo alongside YouTube:
| https://vimeo.com/ninofficial
|
| 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.
|
| (p.s. wot up volk)
| volkl48 wrote:
| Oh hey, I certainly know that username!
|
| 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).
| pimlottc wrote:
| Trent also famously mourned the closing of Oink.fm, at
| one time the world largest largest music torrent tracker
|
| https://www.wired.com/2007/10/trent-reznor-on/
| progmetaldev wrote:
| 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.
| augusto-moura wrote:
| You made me curious about the recording, could you share the
| youtube link for it? Only if you are comfortable with it, ofc
| jjulius wrote:
| 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...
| brightbeige wrote:
| Not OP, but my guess is Underworld.
|
| Edit: or Erasure?
| jjulius wrote:
| Huge fan here, that was my immediate guess as well. :)
| lukan wrote:
| "Record All The Things."
|
| Unless you use a crappy smartphone with a bright annoying
| screen ..
| TYPE_FASTER wrote:
| Somebody whipped out a freakin iPad and started recording
| video in front of me once. Like wtf
| hungryhobbit wrote:
| 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!
| brightball wrote:
| 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.
| bilekas wrote:
| I have my worries about Internet Archive more and more recently.
|
| I'm wondering though is there any decentralized IPFS or P2P
| Archive of the entire archive that can be helped with for
| preservation ?
|
| https://www.wired.com/story/the-internets-most-powerful-arch...
| sdellis wrote:
| According to the Wikipedia page, it seems that copies of the
| archive are stored around the world.
|
| LOCKSS is a decentralized strategy for preservation which
| includes archival copies at remote sites. It has been in use
| for a very long time. I feel like preservation via IPFS would
| introduce quite a bit of risk to the goal.
| bityard wrote:
| Yeah, there is some popular misunderstanding about what IPFS
| is... a lot of people seem to think its essentially free or
| subsidized distributed cloud storage. But the more you dig
| into it, the more you realize it's just a fairly inefficient
| caching system.
|
| LOCKSS looks interesting but it seems like it's exclusively
| for libraries.
| badlibrarian wrote:
| I can find no current public document from the Internet
| Archive explaining what is backed up, where, or at what
| redundancy level.
|
| From a 2016 blog post:
|
| "Do you do backups too, for example to guard against corrupt
| data getting mirrored across both copies, or accidental
| deletion?"
|
| John Gonzalez, the author and IA infrastructure lead,
| replied:
|
| "We have done experiments to confirm that we can back up
| large portions of our corpus... but this is not a regular
| practice for us at this time."
|
| https://blog.archive.org/2016/10/25/20000-hard-drives-on-
| a-m...
| WalterBright wrote:
| Many software companies in the 80s were quiet about their
| software being bootlegged because it turned out to be great for
| building a critical mass of users of their software.
| strickinato wrote:
| I can't more highly recommend this book for getting into the
| headspace of the era a lot of these recordings.
|
| 11 chapters about DIY / Punk / Hardcore bands of the 1980s
| underground scene.
|
| (The audiobook in particular is fun as it's read by musicians
| influenced by the artists in their respective chapters)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Band_Could_Be_Your_Life
| pjmorris wrote:
| Seconded. This was a great read, and led me to a lot of great
| listening. And some wondering about how far Minutemen would've
| went if D. Boon hadn't passed so early.
|
| I also think there's a lot to learn from the book about DIY for
| any startup or community organizer.
|
| Lastly, if you read and you want to learn more about 'The
| Replacements', 'Trouble Boys', Bob Mehr, is a terrific read.
| ilamont wrote:
| > I also think there's a lot to learn from the book about DIY
| for any startup or community organizer.
|
| The parallels with being in a band and a startup are real.
| Azerrad says many times in the book that what these bands
| were doing was entrepreneurial.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >listen now
|
| These are dangerous words to use for an archive site for material
| still protected under copyright.
| darkstarsys wrote:
| But what about copyright? Asking for a friend.
| sph wrote:
| My friend Sam Altman said not to worry.
| bguberfain wrote:
| Not to demerit the recording, but I felt more nostalgic for the
| last sentence of the article "Sometimes, the internet is good"
| than for the musics itself.
| ilamont wrote:
| On the afternoon of October 6 1989 I attended a Fugazi concert in
| Cambridge Mass, probably one of the best live shows I've ever
| seen.
|
| Last year I casually searched YouTube for some shows I had
| attended in my youth and this one popped up, recorded by a high
| school classmate who happened to be there, filming from the side
| from a balcony or rope rack used by stagehands.
|
| I then went to the Fugazi Live Series archive to see if there was
| better quality audio (the band recorded most of their shows from
| the 1980s through the early 2000s, and posted almost all of them
| in the archive). That October 1989 concert was in the database
| (https://dischord.com/fugazi_live_series/cambridge-ma-
| usa-100...), and there were some comments by others who attended,
| but there was no supporting media other than a single photograph.
|
| So I emailed the address on the website:
|
| _Hi, regarding this show someone created a video recording from
| which the audio can probably be extracted. It 's on YouTube here:
|
| https://youtu.be/0XS3QD2cddo?si=1TM9PglNv-Rlr98w
|
| I was at the show but not near the stage. It was a memorable show
| for me and many others according to the description on the
| official Fugazi archive.
|
| The uploader of the video (my high school classmate, who I
| believe was a member of the FUs at some point) says:
|
| "In 1989, I went to the First Congregational Church, In Harvard
| Sq. Cambridge Massachusetts, in hopes of getting into this Fugazi
| show. Unfortunately, the promoter pre-sold the tickets to people
| he knew. Thus there was a large crowd of people trying to get in
| without tickets. Fortunately for me, I had been friends with him
| before, and he let my girlfriend and I in. Once inside, I asked
| Guy if I could videotape the show, he told me to go ahead... as
| long as I sent a copy of the video to Dischord Records... I never
| did... I just wasn't responsible enough in those days to
| bother... anyway, here it is, the full show, in all it's faded
| and low resolution glory... so go ahead, enjoy, and share."_
|
| To my surprise, Ian MacKaye responded! While he could extract the
| audio from YouTube, he wanted to know if I could get in touch
| with my high school classmate who might still have the original
| tapes which would have better quality. I did, and my classmate
| actually got the tapes (from his old girlfriend, who had them in
| a box in her basement) and shipped them off to Ian. At some point
| they will be properly digitized and put on the Fugazi archive.
|
| I had a long interview with Ian about archiving which I hope to
| post on my blog later this summer. To make a long story short,
| he's amassed a huge collection of materials from Fugazi and his
| previous bands (most notably Minor Threat) which includes concert
| audio, studio audio, video, photos, concert flyers, and every
| piece of fan mail they received at Dischord House from the 1980s
| to the present day.
|
| He's very systematic about organizing the archives, thanks to
| interactions with trained archivists including several working
| for the federal government (he's based in Washington DC).
| dfxm12 wrote:
| What's your blog?
|
| Minor Threat was before my time, but I've seen Fugazi and The
| Evens a few times. Ian always puts on a great show. He seems
| like a really thoughtful, detail oriented guy. I'm not
| surprised that he keeps organized archives or that he found the
| time to respond.
| ilamont wrote:
| My blog is related to my genealogy business, not music. But
| the story about archiving old audio and video is relevant to
| the struggle of many genealogists to preserve old media, a
| frequent topic on the blog:
|
| https://easygenie.org/search?q=media&options%5Bprefix%5D=las.
| ..
| mmmlinux wrote:
| So how long till your just greeted with a page telling you the
| archive has it, but you can't download it because of DMCA.
| SoleilAbsolu wrote:
| Wow, this is very cool, I have been looking for the Phish show at
| Lounge Ax from November 1990 (opening for Alex Chilton of Big
| Star) for ages. It was first time I saw them live, and next time
| they came around they graduated from a 300 person club to a 3000
| person ballroom!
| everyone wrote:
| I used to record concerts I went to with a minidisc player and a
| small battery powered mic.. I have Beck, Radiohead, Dj Shadow,
| Kid koala, Q-bert. Defo fun to listen back to, especially the
| bullshit my friends and I were saying.
|
| Also there was a shop in Temple Bar Dublin that seemed to
| specialise in selling bootlegs. They were really expensive, but
| really good, clearly taken from the sound desk.
| lastdong wrote:
| This brings back some memories. I often recorded live gigs from
| the radio. It was the best way to discover new bands and share
| them with friends at parties. The Internet Archive keeps on
| giving, what a great project.
| standardly wrote:
| Some great commentary in here. I agree all games have loops, so
| the authors stance against them comes off as a bit confusing.
|
| I think what the author is getting at is when loops are obviosuly
| "felt" and feel canned.
|
| Strategy games typically have obvious, tight loops. Turn-based
| games are loop-driven by definition. And so on. This is fine.
|
| But single player games, single player RPGs, etc, can suffer if
| the loop is really tight and obvious. Early on, you feel "oh, i
| get it. it's going to be 40 more hours of THIS". Novelty wears
| off if the loop doesn't really change or evolve. Whereas in turn-
| based games or strategy-based games, the loop itself IS the game
| because it progresses as the game state evolves. Nobody complains
| about the game-loop of chess because that's the game - if you
| don't like the loop, you don't like the game and the convo ends
| there, is what is is. But a single-player adventure game, for
| example, has to do a lot of other stuff right to keep a player
| incentivized to keep playing the "loop".
|
| Best example would be BG3, where theres clearly a loop - but its
| massive. Theres a LOT of variation and events between leaving
| camp and returning later that night. So each "loop" rarely feels
| samey.
|
| I think the issue is when gameplay loops become transparent and
| predictable rather than maintaining novelty. A LOT of games
| suffer for this - the type of game you agree is good, you enjoy
| it, but put it down after 12 hours for some reason. It's bc of
| this. The human brain seeks novelty.
| pimlottc wrote:
| You probably meant to reply to a different post:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47764164
| cold_tom wrote:
| This is one of those cases where preservation clashes with
| ownership. Without this, a lot of those recordings would just
| disappear.But at the same time, they're not really his to share.
| Hard to draw a clean line here.
| LightBug1 wrote:
| Breathlessly cannot wait to share some of this stuff with my
| people ...
|
| This is what the internet is for.
|
| THANK YOU.
| soneil wrote:
| 2100 entries over 40 years is pretty much a show a week. Talk
| about artefacts of a life well lived.
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