Musicians Put Concerts On The Web

[DudeAsInCool]

Seeing Payday, Not Piracy, Musicians Put Concerts on the Web

January 22, 2004

By SETH SCHIESEL

SHORTLY after Phish, the improvisational rock band,

finished its New Year's Eve concert at American Airlines

Arena in Miami, perhaps a couple of hundred people remained

at play in the private suites that lined the hall. Brad G.

Serling, as big a Phish fan as they come, joined them

briefly but soon had to depart for the bowels of the arena.

"Everyone's making plans to go party, and here I am making

plans to go to the production office," said Mr. Serling,

31. His tone was a bit rueful, but he was certainly not

complaining.

That is because there was no place Mr. Serling, a Johnny

Appleseed of online concert recordings, would rather go. By

2:30 a.m., he later recounted, he had the entire concert on

his iPod, courtesy of the band's sound engineer. At 4:30

a.m., he was back at his hotel in South Beach, transferring

the more than two gigabytes of audio files to one of the

three laptop computers he had brought along.

Later in the day, from a hotel with a faster Internet link,

he uploaded the concert files to the Internet. And so, by

the morning of Jan. 2, Phish fans worldwide could pay

$11.95 to download the New Year's Eve concert from Live

Phish Downloads (www.livephish.com), a site run jointly by

the band and Mr. Serling's company, Nugs.net.

Mr. Serling had also joined forces with three

less-prominent bands - the Radiators, the String Cheese

Incident and Yonder Mountain String Band - to post

recordings of their own New Year's concerts at another

site, LiveDownloads (www.livedownloads.com).

As other technology companies scramble to match the success

of Apple's online music store, iTunes, which sells songs

for 99 cents each, a different online-music economy is

emerging around the sale of recordings of live performances

- often with no restrictions on how they can be played or

shared.

Since it was established in late 2002, Live Phish

Downloads, which now offers audio files for about 50 Phish

concerts, has generated more than $2.25 million in sales.

Its success has helped prompt a new look at the potential

for bands to become their own distributors online.

And on Tuesday, Coran Capshaw, manager of the Dave Matthews

Band, said the group had agreed to set up a downloading

site with Nugs.net. While other bands following a similar

model have focused on selling concert recordings, the Dave

Matthews Band intends to begin in March by selling

downloads of its album catalog, to be followed shortly by

sales of concert recordings. (RCA, the band's record

company, is to receive part of the proceeds from the sale

of albums online.)

Even Phish's record company, Elektra, which receives a

small cut of the Live Phish Downloads proceeds, has

embraced the band's online marketing of its music.

"We always thought it would be nice for there to be a happy

medium where the band gets more involved with the fans, and

this seems to us to be a perfect way to do it," Brian C.

Cohen, Elektra's senior vice president for marketing, said

in a telephone interview. "It gives the fans access to

officially sanctioned recordings. It conditions the fans to

not expect to get these things for nothing, and I

personally think it's a model, both for the record business

and for bands, whether signed or not, to make money from

valuable content and at the same time seed the relationship

in a very positive way with the fans."

One way that selling downloads appeals to fans is by

offering music files that are not crippled by limitations

on where and how many times the file can be copied. Such

so-called Digital Rights Management systems are used by

many traditional online music stores. But most of the

budding concert download sites, including Live Phish

Downloads, sell unrestricted files.

"The No. 1 issue that most of the music industry has wrong

is D.R.M.,'' Mr. Serling said in an interview last week at

his home in Los Angeles. "Why make it harder for people to

buy your product? The answer is fear, and you have to get

over the fear. What would you do if you walked into Tower

Records to buy the new Dave Matthews Band CD and the guy

behind the counter said: 'Here's your CD. It's $18, but you

can only listen to it in your den on one stereo. You can't

take it to the car. You can't put it on your iPod.' You

would laugh at him and walk out, right? It's the same thing

here.''

"I don't live in a fantasy world," he added. "I know we're

getting ripped off left and right by people copying our

files. But people who are intent on ripping you off are

going to rip you off no matter what you do. All we can do

it make it easier for the vast majority of people who want

to do the right thing."

However compelling that argument, Mr. Capshaw said the Dave

Matthews Band had not decided whether its online offerings,

particularly its albums, would be copy-protected or

unrestricted. (For its part, Phish recently gave would-be

pirates a new incentive to do the right thing, announcing

that it was donating its profits from Live Phish Downloads

to a nonprofit group supporting music education for

children.)

Other bands, too, are being drawn to the model. In

November, the hard-rock band Primus began PrimusLive

(www.primus.com) with a company called BackOfficeMusic.

Last month, the guitarist Steve Kimock started a

live-concert download store in partnership with a new New

Jersey company called DigitalSoundboard

(www.digitalsoundboard.net).

A year ago Pearl Jam began offering downloads of live shows

to fans who also bought a CD of that concert. Now, the band

also offers concert recordings through iTunes, though only

song by song.

But even as other bands and other companies get into the

concert-downloading game, Mr. Serling is the sector's

youthful godfather.

Growing up near Philadelphia, Mr. Serling became a serious

fan of the classic rock of the 1960's and 1970's. By 1990,

when he entered Cornell, he was regularly taping Grateful

Dead concerts in the area that the band set aside for

noncommercial tapers - and meeting like-minded fans through

the Internet-based interest groups known as Usenet.

At that time, trading Grateful Dead tapes was an arduous

experience, often conducted by mail, and there was one big

problem: sound quality. "People have all of these

subjective ratings for their tapes and someone's like, 'Oh

this is an A+,' but then you get it and it sounds

horrible," Mr. Serling said. "So I thought it would be

great to put up clips from the tapes so you know what

you're getting."

Given the bandwidth limitations of the early 1990's, that

was a challenge, but by 1994 Mr. Serling had posted some

audio clips from his collection to a computer server set up

for Grateful Dead fans. And so the seeds of Nugs.net were

planted.

After college, Mr. Serling went to work in a new kind of

business - Web design and consulting - where his company

did not mind his using the corporate bandwidth. In 1995, he

started offering RealAudio streams of shows. In 1997, he

bought the Nugs .net domain - short for nuggets - and in

1999 began offering MP3 tracks that could be downloaded and

replayed.

Meanwhile, Mr. Serling continued to collect and post

concert recordings of bands that allowed taping. By June

2000, fans were downloading 500,000 MP3 files a month from

Nugs .net, from bands including the Grateful Dead, Phish

and the String Cheese Incident. The demand was met with the

bandwidth of Mr. Serling's new employer, CinemaNow, for

which he became chief technology officer.

When Nugs.net hit that mark, Mr. Serling said, "that was

when I saw that there was enough interest to make a

business out of it" - in other words, to begin selling

recordings, if permission could be obtained.

Around the same time, the same idea appeared to occur to

music executives, including John Paluska, Phish's manager.

"We became aware of Nugs.net in particular as a very

well-run and successful fan site that had both a lot of

shows, high-quality shows and, even more than that, high

reliability and customer satisfaction, even though it was

just a fan site," Mr. Paluska recalled in a telephone

interview. "So we started looking around and asking, 'Who's

running this site?' "

The result was a collaboration between Phish and Mr.

Serling called Live Phish Downloads, established in

December 2002, which now posts live recordings of every

Phish concert for sale within 48 hours. Profits are divided

between the band and Nugs .net on undisclosed terms.

Last summer, when it was clear that Nugs.net had made the

leap from fan site to business and that Mr. Serling had

made the leap from Johnny Appleseed to commercial farmer,

he quit his job at CinemaNow.

Now, from a spacious house in the Hollywood Hills, with a

microwave antenna pointed at a receiver somewhere in the

flatlands below, Mr. Serling is just trying to stay ahead

of his new competitors. In addition to a deal with the Dave

Matthews Band, Nugs.net has reached a broader agreement

with Musictoday, a company run by Mr. Capshaw that provides

Internet services to more than 250 other bands, including

Metallica and the Rolling Stones.

Musictoday already offers services like Web stores,

ticketing and fan club support to its artist clients. Now,

Musictoday will also offer those bands a downloading

service powered by Mr. Serling's operation. For Nugs.net,

the Musictoday deal is meant to expose the company to

hundreds of bands without having to hire dozens of

salespeople.

"Hopefully this deal can help us get to the next level,"

Mr. Serling said.

Until now, most bands that have embraced selling concert

recordings are best known for their improvisational live

performances, not studio albums. Mr. Serling acknowledges

that his distribution model might not appeal to every

musical act - at least until there is more evidence of

potential profits.

For now, though, after years of running Nugs.net as a labor

of love, Mr. Serling feels as if he is living a fantasy. In

addition to the pay sites, Nugs.net still offers dozens of

concerts free, in both streaming and downloadable formats.

"This is what I would be doing even if there were no

LivePhish.com," Mr. Serling said. "I would be out there as

a taper with my recording deck and making files and putting

them up on Nugs.net. It's nice to be able to do the same

thing and also pay the rent."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/22/technolo...adbca64dc598d9a