LIVE PHISH | THE JURY RETURNS

It took them ten years to release the first live album, and now it appears that Phish is committed to helping fans relive their concert experience only hours after the show. Welcome to Live Phish Downloads, the latest incarnation of the Live Phish CD program. This time it's digital.

Phish has once again taken a turn away from mainstream record label trends and embraced the internet as a low-cost distribution mechanism by offering up high quality, unedited soundboard recordings of select shows in the form of MP3 and Shorten digital music files. The select shows include a few past evenings from the band's legendary history, including an old-school Halloween show from 1990 in Colorado, the epic December 7th, 1997 gig at the Nutter in Dayton, OH, and the famed "final show before the hiatus" from October 7th, 2000 at Shoreline. Additionally, the band shocked and delighted fans by offering up all four shows of their recent New Year's Eve reunion run on their website within 24 hours of each performance, as the debut of Live Phish Downloads hit the netwaves.

As they've done in the past, Phish is now taking things to another level by offering downloads of their entire twelve-show February tour for the pre-order price of ten shows... before the band has even played a single note. For the hard-cores, this seems like a dream come true, and for those a little more cautious about their show selections and pocketbook, the band promises that individual shows "will be available via Live Phish Downloads no later than two days after each show."

Live Phish Downloads caters to the typical Phish music collector by giving buying access to the now standard web audio MP3 format or, for a slightly greater price, the higher quality lossless SHN format. Yes indeed, these are the exact formats that are making record label executives lose sleep at night, fearing file-swappers are stealing their main source of revenue. So why is Phish offering up their product in the most unsecured of formats?

"Ultimately, we valued convenience over security. People need to be able to listen to music on their own terms," says Jason Colton of Dionysian Productions, Phish's management. "We've made the service so affordable and accessible that the easiest way to get the shows is just to fire up your computer and get it direct from the band."

Burners everywhere will be delighted to know that Phish also offers printable CD art booklets, tray inlay and CD labels for free on their website to complement the downloaded music. As if that wasn't enough, they also offer products and supplies at the Phish Dry Goods merchandise site to assist the CD creation process. ("Who's got my CD Label Applicator and 40 pack of Glossy CD labels?")

By outfitting their fanbase with the music and tools to create their own CDs, Phish is essentially outsourcing the entire CD manufacturing process through an inverted style of music distribution. Music is digital, cases are physical, and thus what you have is plain and simply a create-on-demand economy, where the only overhead is the recording costs and bandwidth.

A New Twist on a Hot Issue

In an era where the music industry is gasping for air (see Wired: The Year The Music Dies) and file sharing is still booming in the post-Napster fallout, it is clearly a time for an innovative approach to selling music.

Throughout history, the record industry has remained somewhat in-line with the trends amidst the evolution of technology. From records to tapes to CDs and dats, the controls have always stayed in the physical realm. But now that music has gone the way of easy swapping computer files with free services like Kazaa, all the rules have changed. Hoping to adapt to the growing ease of the internet, the major labels recently introduced two different versions of digital distribution. MusicNet (Warner Music, BMG and EMI) and PressPlay (Sony and Universal) have seen a lukewarm response, most likely due to the fact that a music lover has to subscribe to both services in order to experience the full gamut of music available in record stores. A better option than those two mainstream efforts is Listen.com's Rhapsody software, which is distributed by JamBase. Listen.com has also introduced an on-demand streaming audio subscription service featuring close to 300,000 songs from every major label and almost one hundred indie labels. All of these services take an "all you can listen to for one price" approach, and the jury is still out on whether any of them will become the new standard. Having researched all the options, we think Rhapsody has the best to offer; test it out if you've got broadband and a PC.

So why is Live Phish better? Well, the philosophy is really very simple: Give the people exactly what they want, the way they want it. Phish fans want high quality shows, they want them now, and they want them on their computer, stereo, car, etc.

Sickest Ever webmaster and former Napster employee Nate Mordo told JamBase, "Ultimately for me it's about control. Like most consumers, I'm used to being able to do certain things with the music I purchase, not least of which is playing it in my car, at home, or any other CD player I find." Nate went on to list the reasons he loves the Live Phish service, in order of importance:

1. Lossless SHN format or MP3: The band is listening to their consumers - these are the formats that people actually use. I can burn discs!
2. Timely delivery: I'm getting these shows the next day. I never used to get shows as quickly as I do with LivePhish.
3. Cost: at about $13 for a three-disc set, that's the best deal in town.
4. High quality recording: Live Phish is giving me better quality than what's usually available from tapers.

Photo by Joe Iudice | 9/22/00

With any luck, Live Phish will be here to stay, and might make the mainstream record label industry take not only a pause from its day, but a tip from one of the historically hardest working bands in show business.

Live Phish Downloads are available from LivePhish.com.

Ted Kartzman / Andy Gadiel
JamBase Headquarters
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