concerts

Tuesday's post on using Craigslist to buy secondhand concert tickets drew a response from a company called FanSnap, which uses live feeds to aggregate ticket listings from online marketplaces and broker sites (such as StubHub and TicketNetwork) and eBay auctions.

FanSnap would argue Craigslist is fine for price-sensitive fans who don't need to go to a particular show and who are willing to meet and negotiate with other individuals, pay cash where necessary, and run the risk of buying a fake ticket. (Although the only time I've ever seen a fake concert ticket was in 1989 on … Read more

Ticket scalping has been a hot topic in the music industry for years, causing a lot of uproar and complaints among music fans.

The sad fact of the matter is that lots of parties in the music industry try to sell secondhand tickets for a markup. Ticketmaster owns a premium resale service called TicketsNow. It also owns a resale exchange, TicketExchange, which lets any individual (including scalpers) buy or sell a ticket. Even artists and managers frequently take their allotments and sell them on broker sites for a markup, as The Wall Street Journal has reported.

Worst of all is … Read more

Record label EMI this week announced that it will begin selling on-the-spot recordings of concerts.

The name of the initiative, Abbey Road Live, is a bit misleading--it doesn't have anything to do with the Beatles album or the recording studio after which it was named.

Rather, EMI is using its Abbey Road brand to indicate that these aren't low-quality bootlegs but professional multitrack recordings, mixed and mastered on the spot, and sold on CDs, DVDs, or flash drives to fans at the venue. EMI also said on Wednesday that it plans to make the recordings available as streams … Read more

The Rolling Stones really were the world's greatest rock and roll band in 1969. That was 40 years ago, but if you need proof to verify the ancient claim, check out the "Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out! The Rolling Stones In Concert--40th Anniversary Deluxe Box Set."

The Stones' live shows of the '70s, '80s, '90s and '00s were spectacles of frenzied energy, extravagant sets, video projections, and lots of flash, but "Ya Ya" was the real deal. The five Rolling Stones were the show, and that was more than enough. If you're going to only buy one live Stones CD, get "Ya Ya."

The original album was recorded over two nights at Madison Square Garden; I was there at one of those shows. I had a great time and bought the LP as soon as it came out. Still have it.

Keith Richards and Mick Taylor's yin vs. yang guitar styles meshed perfectly on "Midnight Rambler" and "Sympathy For The Devil." Mick Jagger and Richards paid tribute to the man who invented rock and roll, Chuck Berry, with a romping "Little Queenie." The new box set includes the original version on CD, plus a five-song EP from the same shows, with unplugged performances of "Prodigal Son" and "You Gotta Move." Sound quality is really good for a 1960s-era live recording, but I prefer the sound of the single disc "Ya Ya" SACD that came out in 2002, at least when it's played on a SACD player. … Read more

Wolfgang's Vault is an online archive containing hundreds of high-quality concert recordings, mostly from big classic-rock artists like The Who and U2, but with a few newer artists, such as The Walkmen, thrown in as well. (Here's a complete list of performers whose recordings are available on the service.)

Last month, Wolfgang released an updated version of its much-lauded free iPhone application, Concert Vault, which gives you access to these amazing shows directly from your iPhone or iPod Touch.

The update adds a couple minor features, including a list of featured concerts--helpful for keeping track of shows that … Read more

JamBase, one of the first and certainly most famous online concert-listing services, released its free iPhone app last October. It was a simple affair: you entered your ZIP code and the app returned a list of live music shows in your area over the next few days. If you had a list of favorite artists stored at the JamBase Web site, it would track those artists for you. Since then, competing apps like Bandloop and iConcertCal have upped the ante with more sophisticated interfaces and GPS targeting, which lets them find nearby shows without forcing you to enter any data. … Read more

In its typical stately and slightly behind fashion, The New Yorker magazine this week published a piece (subscription required) about big changes in the live music industry. The article used as its grounding point a recent dispute between Bruce Springsteen and Ticketmaster over scalping and ticket withholding by artists, but the larger point was that the concert industry may be following the recording industry down the tubes--a prediction I made more than a year ago. The article has reams of supporting statistics and quotes, but the simple point is that the big acts aren't selling as many tickets as … Read more

I went to Portland, Oregon, to visit my parents last week and had a great time spending time with my family and checking out the local breakfast spots. I even found new places to explore (thanks to my trusty iPhone). One thing I knew going up there is that my father and his girlfriend had already bought two iPhone 3GS phones and I would not be hearing the end of how much better theirs were than my year-old iPhone 3G. But my mother and stepdad live up in Portland too, and once they saw how cool and fun my iPhone … Read more

It's been a couple years since iConcertCal introduced its iTunes plug-in, which scans your iTunes library and creates a personalized concert calendar for your city.

Now, Apple has accepted an iPhone version of iConcertCal into the App Store. The concept is the same: it scans songs stored on your iPhone, then uses the iPhone's GPS to create a list of shows by those artists in your area. If you install the iConcertCal plug-in to iTunes, the app can also create a list of artists from your entire iTunes library (which is probably larger than the number of artists … Read more