And We Bid You Good Downloading
Bad vibes were abundant on the web for the past couple of weeks; the Grateful Dead announced that they were going to prevent users from downloading live Dead shows from Archive.org. They asked the site to only allow streaming audio and to axe the downloads. The Dead has always been “taper friendly,” so this was big news to Dead fans.
Consequently, the band was overwhelmed by the negative response of the Deadhead masses, so they changed their minds and decided to allow the downloads again. There’s a catch, though: People will be able to download fan-taped audience recordings, but they won’t be able to download soundboards. Soundboard recordings are favored for their clarity, presence, and absence of audience chatter (”Hey man, pass that over…”). The Dead wants to reserve their right to release the soundboards as commercial CDs or downloads in the future. Fair enough. Most audience recordings are pretty good anyway, and some people prefer audience recordings because it better represents what the band sounds like in a full room.
Archive.org (formal name: “The Internet Archive”) is a non-profit site that aims to collect shareable Internet data of all kinds. The server space and the bandwidth are donated by the Library of Congress. The live music offerings are fairly narrow — lots and lots of jambands — but more taping-friendly acts are allowing the Internet Archive to host their tunes all the time. The library is definitely worth browsing. You can download most of the recordings as low quality 128K MP3s, high-quality VBR MP3s, and lossless FLACs. And, of course, you can listen to recordings as streaming audio. Monkey Bites would like to recommend the work of guitarist Will Bernard.
No word on what the future holds for the Dead’s commercial pursuits on the web, but time will tell. What would Jerry do?
