Today the New York Times has a nice big piece about the revivial of the internet in the music business, writing:

A dot-com-era bid by concert promoters to market live gigs online fizzled out. But now concert Webcasts and vintage performance clips are gaining new currency. An array of players — from independent record labels to major concert promoters — are drawing up plans to capitalize on fans’ appetites

They pay particular attention to efforts by bands, fans, promoters, and record labels to post videos to YouTube and point out that:

Within the music industry, however, there is still widespread debate about whether a thicket of copyright and contractual issues will slow or prevent some of the new enterprises from taking off.

The “big question?”

What role, if any, will be carved out for fans who take their own pictures and “bootleg” video at concerts?

Erik Flannigan, general manager of America Online’s music, film and television content, said that at a big arena performance these days “20,000 people walk through the door.” He added: “How many people who went to that show walked out with some kind of media captured? They called someone, they took a photo. Why not harness that and turn it into something?”

One idea being bounced around is the creation of online fan forums, where music lovers could post pictures and interact with one another after a show, said Jim Cannella, national director of corporate partnerships for House of Blues. “People want to be heard and they want to develop a community of people that have similar interests,” he said.

Creating fan forums is certainly one approach, and not bad though hardly novel. But it misses the enormous point that many if not most cases the fans have already done that for themselves. They are already out there pooling these resources, creating these materials, talking with each other after shows. So the question of fans’ roles is not just one of what to do with their materials, or how to bring them together online, it’s how to take advantage of the materials and online communities they are ALREADY generating on their own. The real question is how to manage what fans do anyway in ways that will benefit the artists. If you are going to create a fan forum, it has to be one that is better than what they’ve already got. Package it with ads to generate your revenue and it might not be.

I wrote the other day about the Madrugada fanboard, which is an interesting example of the value of fan materials like this. Last fall the band toured Europe. Fans on that forum recorded several shows themselves, spent a good deal of time not just creating torrents, but also in some cases remastering the recordings for best sound. Others posted photos they had taken. Living in the States, it was a lot closer to getting to see them live than I ever would have gotten without the board. There is an archive of back concerts that are periodically reseeded and traded again. I’ve amassed enough live Madrugada recordings through the board that I have a pretty good sense of what they were like on each tour of their career. This is done with the band’s tacit approval, with the understanding that there is no money exchanged and nothing available for purchase is posted, points which the webmaster gently enforces when need be. Not only did it keep fans who weren’t able to make this tour involved with the band long after their last release might have stopped getting playtime, but it also brought in fans who didn’t like the recent release, fans who wanted to know what old songs were being played. So it kept fans they could easily have lost involved with them. Would it have worked if it were a board run by the band? Maybe, if they were able to resolve the copyright questions in ways they and those around them could live with. Would it have worked if it were a board run by their label or any other third party? It could, but it would take a good deal more than simply “creating a fan forum.”

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