Wolfgang's Vault to download Concerts coming in April...

stevef · 05 Aug 2006

http://concerts.wolfgangsvault.com

http://forums.wolfgangsvault.com/forums ... /8010.aspx

Downloads Coming in April

We are excited to announce that we are getting closer to launching Concert Vault downloads. The philosophy behind our design and development is straightforward – make the service easy to use, set fair prices and deliver great quality music.

At the outset, our concert download files will be encoded as unrestricted 256k mp3 files (twice the bitrate delivered by iTunes and most other major digital services). Our testing showed that this provides an excellent concert listening experience while still allowing for a reasonable download time and keeping it easy for users to play the concerts on their computers and mp3 players. There are a number of you out there that have asked for (some have actually demanded) lossless files. Please don’t worry – we hear you and we intend to offer lossless in the future. This is largely a timing and resource issue and lossless will be offered as soon as possible.

We will offer only the complete concerts for download, not individual tracks, as it is the best way to hear these shows. It also provides a measure of efficiency which will allow us to keep prices low. The abrupt stops you currently hear between songs will disappear on the downloaded version as those are a function of the streaming Flash player, not the files themselves. Pricing may vary a bit as we move forward, but initially we will offer all shows for $9.98.

At launch, there will be approximately 50 concerts available for purchase and download. This will include some headline acts, some hidden gems and a handful of fairly obscure artists. We are working diligently to add more concerts and provide you access to everything you might want. We will provide updates as soon as we add concerts to the download list.

There are a few other important updates to the Concert Vault that will go live concurrent with downloads:

• 10 new concerts each week – we will be doubling the number of new concerts from 5 to 10 that we post each week on Concert Vault;

• Genre and era grouping - we have categorized the concerts by genre and by decade so you can quickly access your favorite music;

• Home page redesign – The homepage for Concert Vault has been refreshed and redesigned to allow easier access to concerts directly from the home page.

Thank you for all the feedback – it is tremendously useful to us as we try to build the best service possible. Please keep it coming.

Cheers...

Wolfgang

72stones · **Joined:** 12 Jul 2006 **Posts:** 2109

You know, there's going to be a boatload of lawsuits flying over this. It's going to make what happened with Wolfgang's Vault over the past year seem like nothing in comparison.

Geff R. · 27 Sep 2006

I'm probably going to wait for lossless; the idea of paying for an mp3 rubs me the wrong way; kind of like buying an 8 track tape.

Smiff · 10 Aug 2006

Quote:

I'm probably going to wait for lossless; the idea of paying for an mp3 rubs me the wrong way; kind of like buying an 8 track tape.

Not me. I'm going to buy early and often...before they are shut down by THE MAN

Geff R. · 27 Sep 2006

The downolads have started. With very few exceptions, these are mp3's of commercially released King Biscuit shows. In fact (in a quick look) the only one I didn't recognise as a commercially released KBFH cd is the Marty Balin & possibly the Teddy Pendergrass. BFD.

http://concerts.wolfgangsvault.com/Conc ... wnload&ID=

Ken Banya · **Joined:** 09 Oct 2006 **Posts:** 137

No lossless, no sale for me.

AMW · **Joined:** 26 Sep 2006 **Posts:** 4543

http://www.billboard.com/#/news/wolfgan ... 6989.story

Quote:

The once controversial Wolfgang's Vault, which has amassed the largest collection of licensed streaming live recordings on the Internet, is about to make a treasure trove of those concerts available for downloading.

Beginning Nov. 3, the site will add more than 1,000 titles to the approximately 500 that are currently available for purchase from the site's Concert Vault section, Bill Sagan, CEO and founder of Wolfgang's Vault LLC and its parent company, Norton LLC, tells Billboard.com. The additions will include more than 160 Grateful Dead concerts as well as titles from artists such as Jimi Hendrix, Santana, Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd, Janis Joplin, Jefferson Airplane, Aretha Franklin, Bonnie Raitt, Hall & Oates, Journey, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Jethro Tull, Chicago, Miles Davis, Dolly Parton, Merle Travis and many others.

Leading up to the Nov. 3 "Cracking the Vault Day" blowout, Wolfgang's Vault -- which recently logged its 100 millionth streamed show -- is offering a small amount of new shows twice weekly. The site just put up a Grateful Dead concerts (from May 15, 1970 at the Fillmore East in New York City); future releases include Janis Joplin, Aretha Franklin and Bonnie Raitt (Oct. 2), Hall & Oates and Boz Scaggs (Oct. 6), Santana and Chicago (Oct. 9), Lou Reed (Oct. 13), Miles Davis, Weather Report and Mahavishnu Orchestra (Oct. 16), Twisted Sister and the Ramones (Oct. 20), the Byrds, Dolly Parton and Waylon Jennings (Oct. 23), Cheap Trick (Oct. 27) and Bob Dylan, Mountain and Pink Floyd (Oct. 30).

The download prices will run $7.98 and $8.98 for MP3s and $11.98 and $12.98 for Flac recordings. Wolfgang's vault will also introduce a $48 annual membership which includes a $50 gift certificate, discounts on recordings and memorabilia and unlimited higher-end 192k streaming.

Sagan says that the new rash of downloads are "the result of negotiating agreements with performers and record labels that not only acknowledge our ownership of this material but gives us rights to exploit it" in a variety of formats, including ringtones and satellite radio. Sagan estimates that through the acquisition of a dozen archives -- including Bill Graham Presents, the King Biscuit Flower Hour, Silver Eagle and the Festival Network -- since its inception in 2002, Wolfgang's Vault has amassed nearly 10,000 live shows, of which about 3,200 are currently streaming on the site.

The agreements including royalty payments in addition to the mechanical royalties the company routinely pays to publishers.

"The objective is that just about everything we stream we'll be able to download," Sagan says. "When we hit Nov. 3, more than half the concerts...will be available for download. By Christmas or slightly after Christmas we'll be closer to three-quarters." Sagan also hopes to begin making video footage the company has acquired available on the site in the near future.

There are some holdouts to the downloading plan. Sagan says negotiations are continuing with big names such as Bruce Springsteen, the Rolling Stones, the Who and Dire Straits, and he's hopeful agreements will be reached with most of those in the near future.

In addition to the Concert Vault, Wolfgang's Vault also sells memorabilia, operates a Vault Radio network, displays music photography and publishes an online version of Crawdaddy magazine. It also operates what MacWorld magazine named the best all-around iPhone App earlier this year. The company's Daytrotter.com site, meanwhile, offers recordings by new, mostly independent bands.

Geff R. · 27 Sep 2006

Oh my....................... There goes my wallet.

All of their Tubes shows are already in Flac, & I have bought several, + a Quicksilver show. There were some issues with the early Flac dl's, & WGV gave me a $15 gift cert (+ replaced the bad files) as an apology. Once I had a person there to contact by email, I have held them in high regard (they aren't real good about responding to forum posts, to put it nicely).

If they go all flac, it's going to be really hard to keep to a resemblance of a budget; they have some great stuff.

Geff R. · 27 Sep 2006

A source at WGV just emailed me the following,

"As we speak we are (a) encoding flacs for all existing downloads and (b) working to enable
more than 300 shows for download that are currently streaming only. Big announcement in a
couple of weeks. Stay tuned!"

& when I asked if I could post the above here,

"Certainly. It’s out in the news already:

http://www.billboard.com/news/wolfgang- ... 6989.story

They exaggerate the details a bit, but this is mostly correct."

Geff R. · 27 Sep 2006

Here's the latest announcement from WGV on the expanded downloads:

"November 3rd is a big day for us here at the Vault. We have been plowing through the archives over the past few months to prepare a huge release of new downloads featuring concerts from many of your favorite bands. A number of these have been on the site for free streaming and others will be brand new additions. To give you a sense of the numbers, we currently have 389 concerts on the site that you can download. This number will increase to over 700 on the 3rd. This means more of The Grateful Dead, more Santana, more Stevie Ray Vaughan, more Miles Davis, and dozens of others. We have had requests for many of these shows over the last couple of years and we’re thrilled to make them available.

For you audiophiles out there, some exciting news to add - every show we offer for download will be availble on the 3rd in lossless FLAC in addition to our standard 256k MP3. You may have noticed we started doing this with our more recent downloads and we are going back and re-encoding everything in both formats."

Smiff · 10 Aug 2006

I just discovered that there's a Wolfgang's Vault app for the iPhone. I can listen to any of the concerts for free directly from my phone. I'm listening to a George Harrison show from 1974 right now. This is wonderful!

Geff R. · 27 Sep 2006

FYI, the big rollout has occurred. Prepare your wallets, 746 downloads in flac!

http://www.wolfgangsvault.com/downloads ... loads.html

Geff R. · 27 Sep 2006

BTW, if anyone still wonders why the free Grateful Dead dl's were removed from archive, i think we know now. There are a TON of Dead shows now for sale on WGV.

Geff R. · 27 Sep 2006

Getting ready to open my wallet for a few of the new shows. Definitely going to grab all 3 Maria Muldaur's (the 2 full length shows are to die for), & probably the David Bromberg & 1 or 2 of the tons of Airplane shows. That's already over my budget! I've previously bought all the full length Tubes shows, 2 Lou Reed shows & 1 Quicksilver. Now if they'd just add the Stephen Stills & CSNY shows to the flac downloads......... As it is, i have around 50 shows in my "favs" section to purchase someday.

I've been looking for the Muldaur's for years (I had the '76 show as a teenager taped from the radio & it was stolen from my car) , & capped the stream of 1976 a year or so back, but I'm still going to purchase cd quality versions. The 1974 show has Benny Carter on sax!!! Along with "Sweets" Edison, JJ Johnson, Bud Shank & more from the Waitress band. & the '76 show has John Girton on guitar!

BTW, they also seem to have drastically improved the quality of there streams.

Tricky Kid · **Joined:** 23 Sep 2007 **Posts:** 8297

After looking at the complete list, I'm also pleased with how much free material is available. Having said that, there's plenty of stuff I'd also like to purchase at some point...

Geff R. · 27 Sep 2006

My wallet has slimmed this week's purchases to the 3 Muldaur shows & the Bromberg; though the Cold Blood Record Plant & 1 of the Jesse Colin Young shows are also really tempting. Unfortunately the few JA shows I've sampled so far just aren't very good.

Geff R. · 27 Sep 2006

Just got an email from WGV that they're creating a new membership option.

For $48 yearly you get $50 in WGV credit, + 30% off all downloads & a doubled stream bitrate to 192k (I didn't ralise the streams were currently below 100k, it's sounded to me that newer streams are at a higher br then older).

Bad: those not purchasing this membership will now be limited to 10 hours of streams per month.

I'm probably in, as I've spent around $150 in the past few months.

Geff R. · 27 Sep 2006

I don't know WHY, but unless they're having a site glitch, it appears that a TON of shows have been removed from WGV in the last few hours. Both dl's & streams. In most cases, it's not all shows from a particular band, just some. I have an email into to a contact there, curious to see what he says.

Geff R. · 27 Sep 2006

I have no idea how long this will work but for the moment.......

If you want to buy or just play one of the deleted concerts AND you know who the artist is......

Google: Artist name site:www.wolfgangsvault.com

Select Cached version & voila...!

Fortunately I was able to buy 3 deleted shows this way!

The one thing this won't do is get a complete listing (at least i can't figure out how).
I tried download site:www.wolfgangsvault.com
& page 1 is the old version, but when I went to page 2 it was the live version, not the cached.

They have gone from 30 pages of downloads to 13 pages so this was a serious purge.

Geff R. · 27 Sep 2006

I haven't heard back from them, but it must have been a site glitch as the 17 pages of missing shows are back today.

Geff R. · 27 Sep 2006

My contact at WGV did just confirm it was a site glitch & not licensing.

Smiff · 10 Aug 2006

There is a very good Neil Young & The Blue Notes download today.

Wolfgang's Vault to download Concerts coming in April...

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