The Last Slobberbone Show and Legitimate Music Trading
Slobberbone is (was) a terrific band from Denton, Texas. Sort of alt.country (whatever that is) I suppose. Or straight up loud rock. They've stopped regularly at the Tractor in Seattle and I've seen them several times there. They played their last show in Austin a couple of weeks ago at the Parish with the Damnations (TX) and Grand Champeen opening. A friend of mine traveled down from Seattle to see the show and called the next morning from some catfish stand with glowing reports about the show.
Fortunately for those of us with toddlers at home and a limited ability to make rock-oriented road trips there are a number of bands that support recording of their shows and the trading of these recordings, and an amazing infrastructure to support the trading community. And Hardcore Maniacs dedicated to getting the perfect recording and sharing it with the rest of us. One of these Hardcore Maniacs who's a fixture on the Austin music scene and known to Gourds fans everywhere made an amazing set of Matrix recordings of the Parish sets and seeded them to Easy Tree (a tracker for BitTorrents). These are soundboard recordings mixed with audience recordings, and the best of both worlds.
Soundboard recordings (where the taper gets the signal straight from the aux outputs on the house mixing board), while generally clean and "pure" sounding, tend to be a little flat and lacking in "spatial feel." This is the signal, after all, that is being sent to the PA system; and the PA and speaker arrays color the sound quite a bit, while the house sound person will be mixing based on how s/he hears what's coming out of the speaker arrays. So what comes out of the board isn't the same as what you'd hear in the audience. Audience recordings, especially when the right microphones and microhone configuration is used, capture the feel of the show better and will tend to have a better stereo image, though they will always pick up some of the ambient noise of the crowd. Mixing soundboard and audience sources together gives you a "matrix mix" which can be terrific when done well.
So last night I grabbed these beautifully mixed Slobberbone and Damnations sets via BitTorrent and rocked out while I got back to work after my daughter went to sleep. Almost made up for not being there. And no copyrights were infringed upon because these bands are part of a small but growing number of artists who retain the rights to their live shows and are kind enough to share them with their fans. TheBig Record Companies are terrified of this because they think the ability to get high-quality recordings of live music will cannibalize sales of studio recordings. They don't seem to get that some of us Hardcore Maniacs have a saturation level several orders of magnitude higher than the average consumer when it comes to the music we love. We still buy the studio recordings so the record companies still get their 85%, but we want MORE! Much More.
The RIAA is actively fighting to kill BitTorrent because they seem to believe that all sharing of music constitutes a copyright infringement. Sharing music that infringes upon the legitimate copyrights of artists is bad for everyone, and may well kill goose that laid the golden DAT. If an artist doesn't want you to record and/or trade their music then you should respect that decision. But not every bit that gets torrented is one that infringes on an artist's copyright.
Deadheads have worked within the model whereby live recordings are allowed to be made and freely circulated (as long as no financial gain is made at their expense) for years. It's great to see so many other bands adopting this model. The best hope we Hardcore Maniacs have of keeping the recording industry from killing the messenger that is BitTorrent is to demonstrate that there is legitimate, non-infringing sharing of music happening on top of this content-agnostic peer-to-peer protocol.