Larger artists have no say in whether they can permit CC to sell legal bootlegs of a concert; their publishing for the material is generally owned by one or more labels who don't like to share acts (and recording revenue).
I am skeptical that they can make QUALITY bootlegs in the time that they are trying to run the discs off and there will be no post-production even review of the recording before it goes to disc. The soundboard has good vocals but can miss reverb, drums, and crowd sound. Audience recordings capture this but lose the vocals, catch too many ambient discussions in the crowd, and can suffer from too much distortion.
$15 for a "legal" bootleg is high too when you consider that you can by a studio recording for that (with real packaging and a pressed, not burned, CD).
whether it's a T-shirt or an,"instant bootleg or a hot dog," said Marsh, a broadcasting analyst at the investment bank SG Cowen Securities.
Why does he call this an instant "bootleg"? If a band authorizes a recording, it isn't a "bootleg", is it?
Millen and other band managers said they received one-third to one-half of the $15 disc price, terms they found agreeable.(Much more than from a record company.)
John Paluska, manager of the jam band Phish, said that the group had already sold close to $1 million in concert-show downloads over the Internet since opening the livephish.com site in late December.
The recordings are typically made available within 48 hours of a performance. So far, Phish fans have downloaded nearly 100,000 concert copies, compared with sales of 180,000 copies of the band's most recent album, "Round Room."
I think the record companies are in danger. They will become an extict species.
Depends how they do things. There are companies that can produce professional-looking CD's and packages in any quantity desired; all of these materials could be produced in advance of the show, so as to allow people to purchase a disk nearly indistinguishable from an ordinary professionally-mastered CD.
As for quality, I would expect it to be on part with that of live broadcast events, assuming suitable care is taken in preparation for the concerts. If two or more people are devoted working on the recording itself, they should be able to end up with extremely professional results by overlappying duties (one of them is responsible for the mix on the first, third, fifth, etc. songs while the other does the second, fourth, sixth, etc. All tracks could be recorded live to a computer while the people doing the mix had jog-dial controls to listen to portions of songs and try different mix settings.
Using suitable technology, it should be possible to get quite excellent results.