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November 30, 2005
McNally speaks
Looks like the official Dead organization message is that the Live Music Archive, as a “one-stop” website, was not in the spirit of community-building that the trading culture supported. Dennis McNally is quoted saying this and more in the New York Time (Deadheads Outraged Over Web Crackdown).
This sounds like an ex post facto rationale to me. In all the years that the band was free with its taping policy, I never heard a word about the marvelous community-building powers of tape trading. I’m not disparaging the idea - I’ve made a similar point here and in other places where this controversy is being discussed, but something about this explanation misses the mark.
I also find it interesting that the Times gets some of the details wrong (implying that the major change was from downloadable to streaming, without understanding that all access to the soundboard tapes has been withdrawn):
The band recently asked the operators of the popular Live Music Archive (archive.org) to make the concert recordings - a staple of Grateful Dead fandom - available only for listening online, the band’s spokesman, Dennis McNally, said yesterday. In the meantime, the files that previously had been freely downloaded were taken down from the site last week.
The article does make one interesting observation, that the Dead’s current file-selling scheme does not involve any form of restrivie digital rights management (DRM):
Unlike the digital files sold at popular music services like Apple Computer’s iTunes or Real Networks’ Rhapsody, the band sells its music as files that can be copied and transferred without restriction.
Here are some of McNally’s comments:
“These folks assembled a Deadhead’s dream collection and made it available,” Mr. McNally said. “When we discovered it, we decided to take a wait-and-see approach. Eventually, it was the band’s conclusion, after a long discussion with them, to request that they change their policies” and make the live recordings available only as streams. The contretemps makes clear that the band’s decades-long support of fan recordings and trading did not anticipate the popularity of music online. “One-to-one community building, tape trading, is something we’ve always been about,” Mr. McNally said. “The idea of a massive one-stop Web site that does not build community is not what we had in mind. Our conclusion has been that it doesn’t represent Grateful Dead values.” Most fans, he continued, “understand they were being granted an extraordinary privilege, and they responded by taking it very seriously” by respecting the band’s wishes not to sell their live recordings. “This is not the same situation,” he added.
and here’s Gans:
David Gans, who is the host of a syndicated radio program, “The Grateful Dead Hour,” said in an interview yesterday that the battle is rooted in the band’s “historically lackadaisical attitude toward their intellectual property.” He added: “When they were making $50 million a year on the road, there wasn’t a lot of pressure to monetize their archives.” Now, however, it may be difficult to put the genie back in the bottle. While the move to revise the Live Music Archive may deal a blow to what many fans considered an organized library of material, “the idea that they could stop people from trading these files is absurd,” Mr. Gans said, adding: “It’s no longer under anyone’s control. People have gigabytes of this stuff.”
Posted by xian at November 30, 2005 5:59 AM
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» Updates at UJB from Dead on Friday
xian over at Uncle John's Blog is staying on top of the current situation fairly well, as are several other Dead bloggers. It's pretty amazing how quickly new developments are getting out and around the net, Phil's statement from... [Read More]
Tracked on November 30, 2005 10:55 AM
Comments
DEAD HEADS... How can I contact Dennis McNally directly via e-mail? Do you have his e-mail address? ... He once interviewed my uncle, Billy Koumantzelis, in Lowell, MA when he was researching his Kerouac biography, DESOLATE ANGEL. ... We were at U-Mass, Amherst together at the same time in the 1970's as well. I would like to contact him. Does anyone know how I can reach him? ... Thanks! - George Koumantzelis
Posted by: George Koumantzelis at December 8, 2005 11:10 AM