New company [di]rec are planning on selling recordings of concerts on USB sticks as you leave the venue. This is an excellent way of selling recordings that are usually hard to monetize (you can usually only make money out of one live recording) and I think people would love to have a recording of the gig that they were at rather than buy a recording through a record store of 1 random concert. It will certainly dampen down efforts of bootleggers.
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I’m not sure who produced them but the Barenaked Ladies concert I attended sold USB sticks with DRM free recordings of the concert, plus photos, on the way out….it worked perfectly and I enjoy listening to the whole concert and recollecting my favourite bits.
G
One question that comes to mind: how will they do the recording? If the production process is not extremely simple, you will only see this at larger concerts, IMHO, where the event producers can afford to pay lots of money for production costs where they expect to get lots of purchases afterwards. This means smaller bands will never see the benefit of an idea like this. We’ve been considering this, and our open source podcasting software will create a podcasting device from any PC that can automate this process. To use it, you just plug in a USB key, then remove it to stop and publish. We are putting these into some nightclubs in Portland, OR with the intention of automating this process and making it so that you can see the cool small bands and not just the Spice Girls. We are always looking for new representatives, so get in touch: http://www.boxpopuli.com.