To Rip or Not To Rip

Last week I was fortunate enough to have a three night stint with Steve Swell's Nation of We large ensemble at a really nice performance venue in Soho. N.O.W. gigs are few and far between...we've existed since 2005 and have now had ten gigs...but they always have the feel of an event. The band is a mix of players from various areas of the scene and often we don't see each other much during the rest of the year so there's kind of a crackle in the air.

After three nights of really exceptional music there was the congratulatory round of emails. During this one of the players mentioned that there was an MP3 of the second night's gig on the web already. I followed the link and sure enough, someone in the audience had ripped the performance and put it up there for free download. There were various reactions to this news and it got me thinking about the bootleg phenomenon and how I feel about it.

Bootlegging is as old as recorded music...maybe even older if you believe the story about baby boy Mozart going home and making a perfect transcription of Allegri's 8 Part Miserere from memory after hearing it once. Musicians have always had an uneasy relationship with it. But with the advances in modern technology and the internet the issue is broader than ever. Portable recording devices are really cheap and incredibly good. You can buy an Edirol recorder for under 300 and get near CD quality from your recordings. I had a portable TEAC myself which, until it went on the fritz gave me really good quality recordings from all my gigs. I am an obsessive ripper and love having even jam sessions documented as I never really know if the music's that good when I play (that's the subject of another post). The controversy though I think is in the use to which bootlegs are put.

When someone rips a live performance and then tries to profit from it by selling the bootleg I think it's a no-brainer. This is clearly wrong and I think most musicians would be angry with this. It's our hard work that's being used to profit someone else who just happens to have a portable recorder and that's not right. The stickier issue is when someone rips a concert and then puts it up on the net for file-sharing. Typically the older musicians I know are pretty much against it. They feel that it is still exploiting the work. I can understand this point of view...especially if the concert is being professionally recorded for release as an album. I know the Nation's gig fits this.

But on the other hand, I'm not sure it's such a bad thing. First of all, most ripped performances, especially of complicated large ensemble music, cannot capture the balances and dynamics of a live recording. Having heard other recordings that our group has made in this venue, the performance on the net is pale in comparison and only caught a small amount of what happened that night. (I would think this though cause on the bootleg the piano is almost inaudible!) Some horn solos sound like they are accompanying the rhythm section while other times when the horns are playing backing lines they are way too far front in the mix. This is not the case in the official recordings of these gigs. So I think the really interested fan would want to opt for an official copy. Secondly, the audience for this music is never going to be huge. It's not like anyone is going to make a fortune off of a free jazz album, especially now as the music industry is changing so drastically. A new paradigm is needed to harness the new technologies and we are all thinking and working in an outmoded product-based model.

I guess to me, recordings of your work are like fairly expensive resumes. They aren't really going to net you much real money. If you are lucky, and self-producing you might make enough money with one recording to fund your next one, but more than that is pretty unlikely. Traditionally musicians have always made their money through personal appearances anyway. So to me, any dissemination of your music to the public is a marketing tool and not something to be scared of. The more interest we can generate in our music the better chance we have to get people out to our gigs...and the better chance we have to tour outside of NYC...to make the break out of the category of "local" musicians.

There's certainly room for diversity of opinion in this debate. But one thing is sure, ripping is not going away and there isn't much we can do to stop it. If the RIAA can't effectively stop file-sharing of Eminem's latest with all the money and clout it has behind it, what chance do we have? We can either make it yet another grievance we have against the state of music, or we can try to figure out how to harness it to our advantage.

I say, make these lemons into lemonade...