Free (and some not free) live music

I love live music. Well, music in general, but there’s something about the anything-can-happen vibe and the interaction with the audience of concerts that’s hard to beat.

With six-month-old twins at home, I haven’t had much opportunity to get out to shows for a while. But I still get to enjoy concerts at my desk, in my car, or on my iPhone. And I don’t mean the edited, polished, compiled ‘live albums’ that record labels release (although some of those can be pretty awesome, too).

If you crave the sounds of a slightly out-of-tune guitar or the banter between a singer and the woman in the front row yelling out a request for “Free Bird,” (or just to hear the show again that left your ears ringing with delight) here are some great places to find free and paid live music.

Free stuff

In the old days, concert goers often taped shows on reel-to-reel machines or cassette tapes. These bootlegs—or, if you prefer, ROIOs (Recordings of Indeterminate Origin)—were often stealthily recorded, of poor sonic quality, included drunken conversations preserved for posterity, and suffered from lots of cuts and tape flips. These days, many bands allow fans to record shows for non-commerical use, and these tapers come equipped with fancy DAT recorders and high-quality mics. The results are some stunning recordings that make you feel like you were standing among thousands of your closest friends, sharing in the groove.

Instead of a taper burning a CD of the concert for some friends, and those friends trading it with others until it finally reaches you, the moden taping scene is about distribution. You can now find lossless FLAC audio files from a show available legally via BitTorrent—often less than 24 hours after a show takes place. For popular bands, there may even be multiple recordings to choose from. Note that iTunes can’t import or play FLAC files, but free players such as Cog can, and the free Max and xACT can convert them to MP3, AAC, Apple Lossless, or other formats. And the Sonos and Squeezebox home audio systems can play FLAC files directly (find out more about those systems in our whole-home audio guide).

One place to look is bt.etree.org, a BitTorrent tracker hosting concerts from many bands such as Phish, Gov’t Mule, Little Feat, Matisyahu, Black Crowes, Los Lobos, and Blues Traveler. The Internet Archive’s Live Music Archive also includes direct downloads of MP3 and FLAC-format concerts from hundreds of bands such as Cowboy Junkies, Grateful Dead, moe., My Morning Jacket, Radiators, Steve Kimock, Warren Zevon, and many others you may not have heard of. Both places are very strict about removing any band or venue that doesn’t give permission to be there.

There are also a number of other BitTorrent sites dedicated to live music (both audio and video), most of which require free accounts and a watchful eye on your ratio of bits uploads to bits downloaded. The biggest is perhaps Dime, aka Dimeadozen. There’s also Zomb Torrents, The Trader’s Den, Lossless Legs, PureLiveGigs and Tapecity Live Music Sharing, just to name a few. There are artist-specific BitTorrents sites such as Genesis-Movement Torrent (Genesis, Phil Collins, Peter Gabriel), Rust Radio (Neil Young), and U2Torrents.com (U2). Most of the sites do a pretty good job of making sure nobody offers up any officially released material, but a “download at your own risk” disclaimer is always warranted.

For more Mac news, visit Macworld. Story copyright Mac Publishing, LLC.