Hard-core concert tapers call it a "daisy chain" - a line of tape decks, linked in series and jacked into the mixing board or sharing a pair of audiophile microphones. By "running" a daisy chain, a dozen tapers can walk away from a venue with a digital stereo recording of the night's performance.
On the Net, those recordings - when traded among fans on a strictly not-for-profit basis - can build an instant buzz around a young band, or grow the fan base of an established one.
Of course, the tapers' ability to take the show home with them, and then share the good news with their friends, is dependent on the band's tolerance of taping and trading. Though war stories of tapers' determination to get the goods even in the face of stringent taping bans and hawk-eyed security guards are legion, more and more bands - from Phish, to Metallica, to a horde of smaller "jam bands" - have adopted the practice of allowing taping and online trading to flourish. Such bands are mindful of the example of the Grateful Dead, which boasted one of the most loyal concert audiences in the history of the industry while virtually turning their backs on the politics of crafting a radio hit.
The increasing acceptance of concert taping, coupled with the proliferation of online resources for tape traders, is just one of the ways that the Net is rewriting the rules about how music is promoted and distributed. By giving fans access to live recordings for the price of blank tape, and by allowing bands to communicate with fans and other bands without middlemen, the Net is not only reshaping the PR and record-distribution industries, it's subtly influencing the music itself, by encouraging a generation of young improvisers to make each performance a unique, collectible event.
The walls between bands and fans are coming down, making both musicians and their audiences not only happy, but successful - if the ability to bring in new listeners worldwide is a measure of success. The question is, where does this leave a recording industry that has made its living by standing between them?
Tapes build the buzz
For the spunky Burlington, Vermont-based jamming unit Strangefolk, publicizing shows via the band's own listserv and on related lists like Hordenet, along with the flourishing of online tape trading, has "sped up word of mouth by a factor of 10" and boosted audiences across the country, says the band's webmaster, Steve Seremeth.
The key to attracting such loyalty is that Strangefolk (along with other bands attended by many of the same dance-happy, college-age fans, such as the Ominous Seapods and the Zen Tricksters) improvise like mad.
"People will travel all over to see them, because they never play the same show twice," Seremeth says. "And the fans use the Web to research the music.... Look at Phish, who have a huge online following - they're not selling albums like Hootie and the Blowfish, but they played the biggest concert in North America last year - the Great Went."
Seremeth, who is in his early 20s, says the Dead's laissez-faire attitude toward concert taping - which went completely against the conventional wisdom of an industry fearful that a proliferation of live tapes would cannibalize the value of official releases - "laid the groundwork for anyone in this genre."
Rock locally, book globally
Online tape trading is just one aspect of how the online connection is strengthening ties between bands and listeners.
James Patterson, the founder of the Internet Underground Music Archive (IUMA), who has spent four years boosting the buzz for bands with names like Hindu Garage Sale and Marginal Prophets, says the Net is pushing "the indie local phenomenon into the global arena" by allowing bands to build community with one another.
For the Poster Children, digitally savvy, prolifically creative rockers from "a little town with big computers" (Champaign, Illinois), posting their "tour journals" from the road has had an unexpected benefit. "We get fans of the tour journals who come to our shows having no idea what we sound like," says bassist Rose Marshack, a former programmer who is also the webmaster of the band's official site.
For Marshack, answering fan email personally and updating the band's Web site is just an extension of the DIY ethic embodied by seminal punk groups like the Minutemen, who designed their own album covers, produced their own music, and never interposed a Wizard-of-Oz curtain of celebrity between players and fans. "We're just four normal people - pretty normal - attempting to lead interesting lives," Marshack says. "I feel it's important to broadcast that."
To help their fans lead more interesting lives too, Marshack included in the band's warm, anti-pretentious CD-ROM, RTFM, a tutorial on building Web pages, as well as tips on how to launch your own record label - plus an insider's view of the technical means used to create the disc. ("The daddy of all multimedia machines, the Mac 8500.... This renders 3-D like a knife going through styrofoam.")
Marshack, who polished her coding chops by writing flight-simulator programs in assembly language, says the Net also helps the band members find places to stay on the road. She's pleased to note that much of the conversation on the "pkids" mailing list, and on the band's newsgroup, alt.music.posterkids, has nothing to do with the band. "I'd rather hear people talk about their lives," she says.
"It's very important for us to feel that there are no barriers around us at all," Marshack explains from a pay phone at a rest stop in Pennsylvania. "I want to meet the people I'm playing for."
Devotion to the moment
Phish stands out as a phenomenon that has benefited from the Net's ability to build audiences - a band that has gone, in a very few years, from packing small halls to headlining at the Madison Square Garden this New Year's Eve, and hosting massive two-day outdoor events like the Great Went.
Shelly Culbertson, the band's "ticketing and Internet manager," is a longtime citizen of the online world. Phish was one of the first bands to inspire the creation of its own newsgroup, rec.music.phish, back in 1991, when only the Beatles and the Grateful Dead were similarly distinguished.
Though the fans of bands like Oasis have recently weathered storms of letters from record-company lawyers attempting to police content on unofficial fan sites, there is no animosity between the official Phish Web site and fan sites like Phish.Net. "We actively protect Phish's copyrights, but the delineation is very clear - everything on Phish.Net is fan-generated content," Culbertson says. Even though some Phish sites carry audio samples of the band's live performances, "as long as the sound is being transmitted not-for-profit, the same guidelines apply, regardless of the medium." (Audio files of official releases are not allowed.)
Seeing the successes of a band like Phish getting a significant boost from newsgroups, tapers' networks, and mailing lists, other bands have tried to jump-start the same process. "I've had people from other bands call me up and say, 'How did you develop such an active online community?'" Culbertson says. "The whole point of it is that it developed itself. It's not something the band ever took intentional steps to create or promote.... They toured very heavily, and they permitted taping, so there was a lot to talk about online."
Reinventing the artist
This emphasis on live, improvised performance, says Clinton Heylin, the author of Bootleg: The Secret History of the Recording Industry, will soon be aided by another technological development: the proliferation of inexpensive recordable CDs.
By making digital concert recordings and market-quality bootlegs of official releases so easy to create and distribute online, Heylin says, "The record industry may face an apocalypse in five years, because when you're talking US$1.99 for a blank, the material is going to be disseminated really quickly." Furthermore, official releases may be shunned by listeners who are no longer willing to pay $15.99 for a disc, Heylin warns.
"The way things are set up now, one makes a lot more money from making the artifact than from reinventing oneself in performance. It would be nice to think that the technology may allow us to return to a state where the artist is a performing artist," Heylin says. "It would be nice if the artifacts that they produced were no longer their raison d'être - which was the state of things for a thousand years."
