Open the Vaults!
David Steinberg
2005-03-06
Recently, Phish have clarified their taping policy. Seemingly created in response to the creation of bit torrents for DVDs - or maybe due to increased discussion of these downloads on message boards - it has been receiving some scrutiny. While reading it, a section caught my eye: Video taping was never allowed. Therefore, copying or trading unauthorized video recordings violates the spirit if not the letter of our policy. Recently the practice has become widespread, increasingly anonymous and further from the spirit of the policy. Video trading, especially among strangers (as with peer-to-peer) inevitably leads to unauthorized product for sale. Tracking and stopping illegal sales wastes energy better spent on official releases. If written policy is needed to restate the obvious, we reserve the right to make and enforce it.
While Phish can and will do whatever they want with their policies, there is a serious misconception in the middle of that paragraph. While it is true that increasing trading raises the possibility that a bootlegger will get a copy, that's not the main effect. When more people have access to free versions of a product, the demand falls dramatically. The history of tape trading has been marred by elitism. In order to get the good tapes you had to know someone and suck up to them to prove yourself worthy enough to get the desired material. We had finally moved beyond that in the past few years, but this clarification romanticizes those days. If the only people who can get DVDs are those lucky enough to know people who have them, there will be an increased temptation to buy the ones available at the sketchy record stores. The only concert tapes I have ever bought were from bands that didn't allow taping, after all. Stopping DVD trading will be incredibly difficult. Why? Because the reward for following Phish's request is so low. Suppose I want Big Cypress on DVD - far from a radical leap of faith here - and I find out about a bit torrent link. If I download it, I get the show. If I don't, not only will I not get a free copy of Big Cypress, but there is literally no other way for me to get this. This isn't the greed based rationale of someone who downloads a cd in order to save a few bucks. I would gladly pay Phish a sane price for this product, but they don't make it available. For a band that revolutionized the way that live music gets sold - how many people are using the Live Phish concept these days? - they sure are behind the ball when it comes to getting DVDs out. There is a diehard group that wants one thing - complete show releases. It's not that complicated to figure out our desire, so why aren't we getting anything? Team Hood makes nothing off of their creations but they've managed to get dozens of shows out there. In the meantime, Phish are wasting their resources by creating things like the chopped up It instead of the whole shows that the fan base craves.
Phish were blessed and cursed with an extremely obsessive fan base. There is something very unhealthy about spending your vacation time in order to be abused by security in East Troy, WI, but we still did that every year. There's a choice to be made now. Feed our obsession and there will be a lot of money to be made. Ignore it and the underground videos will get better and better. No one expects everything to come out at once, but if you make an effort to release full shows (start with the Halloweens and New Years runs and you'll have years of profitable releases), you'll find that people won't bother putting in the work to make fan discs. Drag your feet and the market might disappear. Your fans are so desperate for decent quality video releases, we're busy making our own. Most businesses would want a market like that.
David Steinberg got his Masters Degree in mathematics from New Mexico State University in 1994. He first discovered the power of live music at the Capitol Centre in 1988 and never has been the same. His Phish stats website is at www.ihoz.com/PhishStats.html He is the stats section editor for
The Phish Companion and is on the board of directors for the Netspace Foundation. You can read more of his thoughts at http://www.livejournal.com/users/thezzyzx.
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