News

New technology brings live concerts home

June 20, 2004

NEW YORK (AP) -- Minutes after your favorite band sounds its last note, you can load a live recording onto a cigarette-lighter-sized hard drive hanging off your keychain for  $10 a pop for the recording, and $20 for the reusable, keychain pen drive, according to story on CNN.com.
On May 21 digital kiosks will be installed at Maxwell's, a small indie-rock club in Hoboken, New Jersey., let the downloading begin.

"This is a tool that allows fans to take home and share some of the best independent music from small live venues around the country," said Daniel Stein, CEO of Dimensional Associates, a private equity firm which owns eMusic Live, which created the machines.
For Scott Ambrose Reilly, president of eMusic Live, the idea is to let fans have a legal copy of the show, which he claims gives smaller artists and their labels creative control over the quality of the recording and a commercial stake in its distribution. It is not a one-time recording, and the fans can share the files with their friends, providing free word-of-mouth publicity for smaller bands.

For eMusic Live, the devices are a step up from burning CDs of live performances right after a show ends. "What we were seeing is that a large number of people were taking their CDs home and ripping them to MP3s, so we thought it would benefit music fans to eliminate that middle step," Reilly said.

So how does it work? Patrons approach the touch-screen kiosk after a show and use a credit card to buy the pen drive from a dispenser is attached to the touchscreen. Then they insert the pen drive into a designated slot and the MP3 files are loaded onto the device's 128 MB hard drive.

Whether the technology will take off remains to be seen, but its creators are optimistic and hope to roll the machines into venues around the country soon.

"Admittedly this won't be for everyone," Reilly said. "But since the direction of music is increasingly going digital, I don't see why this wouldn't find its niche."