Phish Spawning Big Music Downloads

Phish Spawning Big Music Downloads
August 8, 2003 - E! Online
By Josh Grossberg

Is Phish swimming upstream, or is its new model of music distribution the way of the future?
As the phenomenal success of the jam titans' new online download service at livephish.com proves, bands don't necessarily need record labels anymore.
Phish launched the Website with heavy fanfare on the eve of their highly anticipated New Year's concert last December, which saw the quartet regroup after a two-year-plus hiatus.
Livephish.com allows band aficionados to download Phish shows within two days of the concert getting three-plus hours of sound-board-based music for the price of a CD--$9.95 for the MP3 format and $12.95 for the higher-fidelity FLAC files.
Phish--which has long kept an open-taping policy, allowing concertgoers to record shows for non-commercial trading among fans--now has made available clean digital concerts of all this year's shows, incudling the heralded New Year's stands and frontman Trey Anastasio's solo performances from the spring.
Just posted on the site are all the sets from Phish's summer tour-ending It festival, which drew more than 70,000 people last weekend to a remote Air Force base in Loring, Maine. In addition to the actual shows, Live Phish is offering for free a copy of the group's sound check and a late-night jam session atop an air traffic control tower.
The Website is a joint venture between Phish's management and Nugs.net, a smaller service that offers downloading of live music by other big-name jam bands, from Phil Lesh and Friends to Widespread Panic to Karl Denson's Tiny Universe.
According to Brad Serling, the founder of Nugs and the former chief technology officer at CinemaNow, which offers video-on-demand technology, Live Phish has been making major waves since its debut, generating more than $1 million in revenue via several hundred thousand successful downloads.
"In terms of meeting the goals that we set out when we launched the service, I would rate it at an 11!" Serling told Jambands.com. "Now, I'm not speaking financially, necessarily. The process is completely new to the music industry, so there is no precedent to go by per se. But insofar as providing a service that fans are truly excited about, I think it has been an enormous success."
The band's philosphy flies in the face of the major labels, which are now looking to bust anyone caught swapping songs.
"Phish has the kind of fans who would download these files and pay for them," Josh Bernoff, analyst at Forrester Research in Cambridge, Massachussetts, told the Associated Press. "It shows an enormous amount of trust in the fan base to put these recordings out there in MP3 format."
At last week's festival in Maine, the quartet set up a tent called the House of Live Phish, where concertgoers lined up for hours waiting for the chance to hop on an iMac and download tracks from a massive selection of Phish shows and burn their own CDs--free.
But the chances of other major acts following Phish's success is slim. First, the band is renowned for its marathon concerts and ever-changing set lists, which keeps fans coming back for more (the band makes more money from concert sales than album sales). The band also has a cozy relationship with its label, Elektra, which gives Phish carte blanche on distributing its music in exchange for a cut of the profits from Livephish.com.
"I think it works in a Phish world," Maureen Coakley, Elektra's vice president of publicity, told AP. "Phish is so unique."
But not alone. Other road warrior acts are plugged in, too, including Pearl Jam, which offers exclusive MP3 versions of its latest concerts at pearljambootlegs.com, the Who, the String Cheese Incident and Ween. Entertainment behemoth Clear Channel is also test-marketing its own concert CD service, which would make several live acts available, as are smaller sites like disclive.com and rockslide.com.
Pennsylvania natives Mickey Melchiondo and Aaron Freeman, aka Dean and Gene Ween, left Elektra years ago and now distribute tunes from their Ween.com. The site allows fans to download live recordings, tune in to Webcasts and get previously unreleased tracks, like the now infamous X-rated Pizza Hut jingle "Where'd the Cheese Go?" The duo even set up a 24-hour Ween radio station.
In fact, the group was able to make its new album, Quebec, which was released by Sanctuary Records on Tuesday, by putting out live recordings of their concerts on their Website.
"On Elektra, our best-selling record sold 200,000 copies or more," Melchiondo told the New York Times this week. "But we still owe all this money to the label. Then we sold just five or 10,000 CDs through our Website and raised $100,000 to make our new album."

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