LiveDownloads
LiveDownloads
Eliot Van Buskirk
Evolver.fm Editor Eliot Van Buskirk has covered and occasionally anticipated music and technology intersections for 15 years for CNET, Wired.com, McGraw-Hill, and The Echo Nest. He is not currently an employee of CNET.
Quick Take: So-called jam bands (think: Grateful Dead, Blues Traveler, and so on) have long embraced the distribution of live recordings, and LiveDownloads is one place on the Web where you can now buy said recordings. Unfortunately, the site has only 19 bands in its catalog, and a huge percentage of the recordings are from one group: the String Cheese Incident. If you're a fan of jam bands--and the String Cheese Incident in particular--you'll be pleased to find that LiveDownloads sells songs from its limited catalog in both MP3 and FLAC (the latter is a perfect-sounding lossless codec).