Instant concert recordings

Instant concert recordings

Live music is booming. Tours are selling out in minutes, there are more festivals than ever before and pundits are heralding this a 'golden age' for the concert industry. While MP3s, ringtones, YouTube and digital television offer music 'on-demand', it's still the live experience - from standing in a Dorset field to sitting in the stalls at Bridgewater Hall - that gets fans excited.

New technology, however, means that live music and on-demand delivery are now merging. In 2006, for example, Monteverdi Productions launched an initiative called SDG on the Night. The company recorded the first half of a Mozart recital by the English Baroque Soloists under Sir John Eliot Gardiner and was ready to sell copies by the end of the Cadogan Hall concert.

In pop music, instant concert recording is a growing industry. London-based Concert Live is an independent company that specialises in recording and distributing live CDs. 'We've only been around for just over two years but from our first to second year we increased our business by 1,000 per cent,' says James Perkins. He and business partner Adam Goodyer came up with the concept following a drunken late-night disagreement over the last song played at a Massive Attack concert.

'We're offering more, the product is becoming more widely accepted in the industry, and more and more artists are getting over the approval process'

Concert Live works artists - including Róisín Murphy, Hard-Fi, Jimmy Eat World and DJ Shadow - to create limited edition live albums (costing £12-£15) and EPs (£5) to sell immediately after concerts and later through its own website. 'It's on the up,' Perkins says of his market. 'We're offering more, the product is becoming more widely accepted in the industry, and more and more artists are getting over the approval process.'

The company has a core team that follows the artists on tour, plus up to 30 promotional staff usually sourced from local music management courses. 'We take split signals from the stage and run them into a 96-channel desk in an vehicle outside the venue,' Perkins explains. 'Once that optical signal is in the van we record the soundcheck and then bring the artists out to hear everything and check it.'

But artists, he says, can sometimes be wary of the process, which doesn't give them final approval of the product. That's because Concert Live produces up to 400 CDs within six minutes of the final note being played - and a further 400 every four minutes thereafter. 'We work on a pre-order basis so because 90 per cent of sales have been done before the end of the concert, we pretty much know how many we need to have ready,' adds Perkins, whose company produces 500-2,500 CDs for a typical concert and up to 10,000 for festivals or large stadium shows.

• Print
• Email to friend
• Discuss