Club Selling USB Drives With Concerts Immediately After Show

from the music-is-promotional... dept

Bootlegging concerts has been around for ages. People would bring tape players to shows and record them. Certain bands appreciated, or even encouraged such recordings - with some even allowing fans to patch into the sound board. These days, that all seems so last millennium. Bands have already started recording their own shows and offering to sell the CDs or downloads immediately afterwards. Now eMusic is trying to go a step further and is actually setting up kiosks where you can immediately download the concert you just saw in MP3 format onto a USB keychain hard drive. They say that selling CDs isn't worth it since people just go home and rip the CDs to MP3 anyway, they might as well give the music out in MP3 format. In fact, they encourage people to then go and share the MP3s, pointing out that it's often smaller, independent bands who will play these shows, and they want the promotion (once again proving the RIAA's stance to be incorrect). The whole thing costs $30 total: $20 for the USB hard drive and $10 for the music. It's unclear if you can bring your own USB hard drive (or reuse old ones) to avoid that charge, but it seems likely. Of course, the one big downside I see with all of this is that the kiosks are bound to be a bottleneck. If you have a few hundred people packed into the club, and just 10% of them want to buy the keychains, that's probably a long wait in line. Why not just put the concerts online and let anyone download them?

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