Wolfgang's Vault, the website devoted to concert recordings and paraphernalia, has signed a deal to offer tapes of shows from the legendary L.A. folk and blues club the Ash Grove. The first show from the Ash Grove vaults, a Freddie King concert from 1970, has been posted.
The Vault, which has collections from Bill Graham's shows in San Francisco and New York, the Record Plant, King Biscuit Flower Hour and other properties, is digitizing more than 100 concerts from the Ash Grove, which was open from 1958 to 1970. Among the artists whose recordings will be offered are are Taj Mahal, Little Richard, Big Mama Thornton, Merle Travis and Mance Lipscomb.
Video is Freddie - from long ago.

One of the most common questions I am asked regards rights, as in "who gave the Democrats the rights to use that awful song after Barack Obama's excellent speech last night?" It evolves into a discussion about the difference between synch/mechanical rights and a writer's copyright, which is not even clear when the all-sample work of Girls Talk is explained by someone who might understand the issue and still draws no distinction between a recording and a copyright.
Using a performer's recording, like John Williams' Olympics themes, can be a big payday for the writer, but a writer needs to make sure that when their songs are covered, they are still credited. Like the people who may or may not have written the Elmore James hit "Done Somebody Wrong," perhaps best known  by the Allman Brothers Band's cover.
I had been looking at a few of their set lists since the Allmans resumed touring on the heels of Gregg Allman's recovery from hepatitis C. One of my favorite bands ever and an addiction I have never been able to shake, I was jonesing for a little Duane Allman and Dickey Betts interplay so I threw on disc 2 of the 2006 edition of "Eat a Peach."
Scanning the liner notes, I noticed "Done Somebody Wrong" was credited to James, Clarence L. Lewis and everybody's favorite white bluesman in a business suit with mob ties, Morris Levy. For some reason, I had never noticed Levy's name in the credits for the song and wondered if it had always been an oversight on my part.
On the original vinyl of "Live at the Fillmore East," which is the first place most of us ever heard the tune, lists the songwriting credit as Lewis, James, David C. Thomas and Morgan Robinson. Lewis and Robinson were something of a team, writing songs such as Lee Dorsey's "Ya-Ya" with their "co-writer" Levy. Who Thomas is remains a mystery.
In 1992, Polygram issued a complete, two-CD edition of the Fillmore East recordings from 1971 and credited "Done Somebody Wrong"to the team of Lewis, James and Levy. But when it came time for Universal to issue a version of the album - in 2003 through its Mercury Chronicles unit - the writing credit was changed to just Elmore James.
Perhaps not too oddly, James gets the lone credit on the song Rhino Records' "Very Best Of" issued in 2000.
A significant reason I lament the digital migration of music to Internet services such as iTunes is the absence of this arcana - the list of musicians on tracks, songwriting and producing credits, recording dates, etc. So many of my peers grew up not just on the albums, but the information held within and these days listeners who limit their purchases to Apple do not even get the benefit of having the label listed. "Live at Fillmore East" brought a fair number of new names to my world as a 13-year-old - specifically James, Willie McTell and T-Bone Walker - that exposed me to a world I did not know existed, and I have long credited the combination of credits on records and curiosity for my insatiable desire to consume as much music as possible. (Last weekend my soundtrack while I was cooking was Mosaic Records' T-Bone Walker set; that stuff has an enduring appeal even if many of the songs are structured exactly the same way).
There's no way to know how many other tunes fit the example of "Done Somebody Wrong" and one wonders how vigilant an heir needs to be to ensure that money from their ancestors' work is going to the right places and is in the right amount. Technology may short change a good number of artists down the road as all it will take is the wrong information being printed once and then repeated; it's bad enough that "American idol" does not require that songwriters be properly credited when the contestants give the wrong name before a song. It's small, but it's one more step toward crushing our musical heritage and the writers upon whose work the American songbook is built. And in the case of Levy, the business executives who stole from the creatives.

As I continue my quest to get to 100 shows and see 300 acts this year, I have slipped a bit lately, making it to two only three shows in the last two weeks and seen six acts. I have 41/136 to go.

To celebrate opening night of their tour, Coldplay is offering a free download on their website. "Death Will Never Conquer" is the one minute, 16 seconds track, which the band writes "you'll hear it at the concerts with a twist..."
Will Champion sang the tune at their free show at Madison Square Garden last month. Meanwhile, one of the band's roadies blogs about setting up in L.A.

Imagine if Columbia Records taped every Bruce Springsteen show and every time they had a collection of four "special" performances they released a new bundle. The fanatics - the ones who keep the bootleg world flourishing and don't mind the sound of someone taking a cell phone call during "My Hometown" - would likely pony up for quality soundboard recordings. If the digital release Columbia has planned for July 15 of four "Magic" performances is the start of a project, it could be a new mondel for the quickly dying live album. If it is a one-shot, it serves its purpose as a fund-raiser, but a void in live recordings remains.
It was only a few years ago that concert promoters were waxing enthusiastically about CDs of shows that could be sold, burned and distributed as a patrons left a venue. That business appears to have disappeared overnight or else been relegated to fan clubs; the thirst ofr recordings by artists known for their live shwos remains.
The beauty of the Springsteen set are the selections:
1. "Always A Friend" (performed with Alejandro Escovedo)
Recording Date: 04/14/2008 (Houston, Texas)
2. "The Ghost of Tom Joad" (performed with Tom Morello)
Recording Date: 04/07/2008 (Anaheim, California)
3. "Turn Turn Turn" (performed with Roger McGuinn)
Recording Date: 04/23/2008 (Orlando, Florida)
4. "4th Of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)" (Danny Federici's final performance
with the E Street Band)
Recording Date: 03/20/2008 (Indianapolis, Indiana)

They are obvious one-time-only performances. The Boss' case, like few others, can deliver those "event moments" without special guests and do it simply through song selection. Great as he and the  E Street Band have been playing "She's the One" on this tour, conversations among fans about the shows centers on the songs that make it into the set for one night. That's the type of "Magic" worth capturing in multiple volumes.

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band's "Magic Tour Highlights" will be available on July 15 via all digital download stores. On sales of these downloads, the artists, songwriters and music publishers are waiving all of their royalties, and Columbia Records is donating all of its net profits to the Danny Federici Melanoma Fund. The iTunes Store is donating their first year's net profits as well.

Unsigned rock bands, whether they be heritage acts or baby bands, were keen on the idea of recording shows and issuing CDs for patrons as they left venues. It was a plan that seemed pretty sound for awhile just a few years ago, but there appears to be less and less interest in the instant recordings.
One has to wonder, though, why didn't the show just moved to the Internet? And face it - many act is performign the same show night after night and they don;t have much value to anyone who was not at a particular concert. Jazz, on the other hand, is ripe for this opportunity: No two performances should ever be the same. Or at least we like to think they won't be.
Jazz trumpeter Dave Douglas sold shows in late 2006 and he's going in for a second round.
Douglas and his band Keystone will be recording all of their sets Thursday through Sunday at the Jazz Standard in New York. Show will be available for download purchase within 24 hours of the performance at the website of his label, Greenleaf, which also boasts a great blog. He's selling each set for $7; all eight shows are available for 50 buck.
Douglas is already making his new album "Moonshine" available at the site; it will be released at retail on May 13. Sets will feature compositions that have appeared on "Freak In," "Keystone" and "Moonshine," as well as unrecorded material.
The downloads will be offered in a new file type called a FLAC file, a lossless compression encoder that delivers CD quality.  The files will be slightly more expensive than the MP3 albums which are also being sampled at 256k, rather than the standard 192k.    
His Friday and Saturday late sets are being recorded for broadcast on the BBC’s Jazz On 3.
Douglas first recorded and released live sets in December 2006.

Daughtry and "High School Musical 2" are duking it out to see which will be the top-selling album of the year, but in Apple's world, Maroon 5 is the top dog. While Apple did not release sales figures, a little bit of math could give us a ballpark figure. It won't be Soon" has sold 244,000 digital copies and the current rule of thumb is that iTunes is responsible for 80% of all download sales. That puts iTunes sales at about 195,000 copies. The digital sales represent 17% of the album's 1.439 million units sold.

ITUNES BEST-SELLING ALBUMS OF 2007

1. Maroon 5 - It Won't Be Soon Before Long
2. Amy Winehouse - Back To Black
3. Kanye West - Graduation
4. Daughtry - Daughtry
5. Colbie Caillat - Coco
6. Linkin Park - Minutes to Midnight
7. Various Artists - High School Musical 2 (Original Soundtrack)
8. Timbaland - Shock Value
9. John Mayer - Continuum
10. Various Artists-  Hairspray (Soundtrack to the Motion Picture)

ITUNES BEST-SELLING SONGS OF 2007

1. Fergie "Big Girls Don't Cry (Personal)"
2. Gwen Stefani "The Sweet Escape"
3. Plain White T's "Hey There Delilah"
4. Avril Lavigne "Girlfriend"
5. Fergie "Glamorous"
6. Kanye West "Stronger"
7. Maroon 5 "Makes Me Wonder"
8. Akon "Don't Matter"
9. Timbaland "The Way I Are (feat. Keri Hilson & D.O.E.)
10. Shop Boyz "Party Like a Rock Star"

Jay-Z has created his equivalent of "Tommy," "Operation-Mindcrime," "Ziggy Stardust" or whatever concept album you chose to compare it to, and he wants listeners to absorb it in full doses. To drive home the point that "American Gangster" should be taken whole and not in pieces, Jay-Z is not allowing the disc to be sold on Apple's iTunes store when it is released Tuesday.
“As movies are not sold scene by scene, this collection will not be sold as individual singles,” Jay-Z said in a statement. Album will be sold online at rocafella.com, Amazon.com and rhapsody.com in addition to brick-and-mortar stores.
Jay-Z's disc was inspired by the film starring Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe and has no music associated with the film.

Very quietly, almost too quietly, Van Morrison has made his catalog available for digital downloading after years of being one of the more important holdouts.
The debut of Morrison albums - and we're talking "Veedon Fleece," "Beautiful Vision" and the record he made with the Chieftains, not just "Moondance" - comes on the heels of him scoring his highest chart debut ever in the U.K. "Still on Top - The Greatest Hits," Morrison's third compilation album released in the U.K. this year, entered at No. 2.
Morrison's online catalog has jumped from a  handful of titles to 43.
Released as double album with 37 tracks in the U.K., it will be released Nov. 6 in the U.S. by Universal's Hip-O as a single disc with 21 tracks.

This giving away music thing is getting contagious in England. The Charlatans, a fine band that found few Yanks interested in their reunion a couple years back (they played pretty good in the rain at SXSW),  has a catch involved with their free music; and Madness is eyeing the move, too, though no one is quite sure who asked them. In a story that clearly involved a reporter asking a music industry professional whether bands without contracts, say Oasis and Jamiroquai , might consider  going the free download route, the answer was  an unqualified "yes."

Years ago, when the suggestion first arose that the Internet would level the playing field among musicians and labels, I figured one of the true beneficiaries would be jazz musicians. The majors are no longer interested in the music, European labels can't guarantee distribution and outside of specialty shops like Downtown Music Gallery in New York and Jazz Record Mart in Chicago, where might a jazz artist get their indie CD heard?
Besides, as the Knitting Factory label learned in the 1990s, indie jazz records do most of their business (about 80%) within a few miles of where the performers/performance space is based.
Palmetto Records, the fine Philadelphia label that has released superb discs by Ben Allison, Andrew Hill and Orrin Evans among many others, makes its first venture into the digital-only realm with the band Slow Poke.
Slow Poke, a popular downtown New York quartet, comprises slide guitarist David Tronzo, saxophonist Michael Blake, bassist Tony Scherr and percussionist Kenny Wollesen. Their album "At Home," which is available at the label's website, was recorded at Scherr's house in Brooklyn. Band's first album, recorded after "At Home," was "Redemption."

Radiohead is making history, or at least writing another chapter in artists taking control of their work. Off the top of my head, some landmarks:
In 1951, Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball created Desilu to produce and own “I Love Lucy” instead of CBS, thereby inventing the Hollywood filmed TV business..
In 1959, Ray Charles tells Ahmet Ertegun he wants to own his own master recordings and the publishing. When Ertegun’s Atlantic Records stands firm with its no, a desperate ABC-Paramount sign him to a deal, giving in to all his wishes. Any act that doesn’t follow that pattern ultimately regrets it.
The  Beatles create Apple Records in 1968 and soon thereafter the Rolling Stones follow suit. No act has as firm a control on their catalog as those two.
Ani DiFranco creates her own label, Righteous Babe Records, in Buffalo, N.Y., and after she releases about seven albums — 1997 or so — her name gets bandied about not because she has built a fan base or makes artistically brilliant music. She  was in the news - and pissed off by it - because she was seeing a profit of nearly $5 per CD sold, a rate that dwarfed the amount made even by major stars. In the dot-com era, CDbaby.com has made a living selling music by the folks following her model; Pitchforkmedia.com has become a critical clearinghouse writing about those acts.
On Oct. 1, Radiohead announces that its next album will be released in three stages, beginning with a digital download version for which each consumer decides what they will pay. Cost of recording, marketing and distribution are covered by the band. It’s a risk, but it eliminates a collection of steps. This is a true downsizing of the business, but one that, if navigated properly, brings fans closer to the artist. The music website Stereogum, which has been around about half as long as Radiohead, declared it the coolest thing a band has ever done.
As much as the Radiohead news was greeted with praise for its decision to go DIY, they have not truly created a model for the future. This is an enormously popular band that only continues to grow commercially. And as they have done in the past, Radiohead is controlling the way their music gets leaked; years ago, the band sent out review cassettes in a Walkman that had been glued shut.
The band has an enormous fan base  that buys into everything the band releases – and that’s the true rarity. (Just thinking out loud: could Beck pull this off? Is this a better option than what Starbucks offers acts? If you're establish and flush, how soon does one need to recoup their investment?)
Radiohead struck at the right time — when fans are still clamoring for new music and musical heroes are few and far between. And in contrast to the major labels and the RIAA, which got a jury to rule Thursday that a woman owed them $200K for making her music collection available online, they look like the good guys. They’re there for the fans.
The move, though, does not herald the imminent decline of the music labels as we know them. Radiohead is in a unique place. And while much of that is based on music, there has been a corporate outfit – EMI’s Capitol Records – marketing, publicizing and selling their six albums. Radiohead did not happen overnight and there is no act that has ascended to similar heights in the last 30 years without a major label behind them.
Not that I am jumping on some pro-EMI bandwagon here. Sold recently to a private investment house whose leader blamed  EMI’s troubles on its seven-year focus on a merger with Warner Music rather than releasing and supporting top-notch music, EMI has been cut to the bone in staffing. Leadership is an important commodity at a label: Capitol broke Radiohead and Coldplay in the boyband era; it is struggling with Interpol (200,000 in sales from a July release) in an age when everyone is thirsty for great indie rock.
Radiohead’s move is about half as significant as that of Brother Ray and if it becomes a future template for the music business, we will forever wallow in a sea of Pussycat Dolls imitations, novelty rap and variations on whatever last year’s surprise hit might have been. Once a year, we’ll have a Kanye vs. 50 type square off and everyone will lament that they don’t make music like they used to  and long for the days of Blues Traveler and Hootie.
Radiohead's move will be an exception to the rule and labels may grow increasingly reticent to sign bands looking forward to the day they become free agents.
The windows for bands like Radiohead to get signed and receive support while they develop seem to close at every turn. Rap, R&B, country — the acts that get signed in those genres are the ones that look ready to make hits, not someone who is three albums and five years away from a hit.
During rock’s album heyday — “Highway 61 Revisited” through “OK Computer” — labels had two agendas: Create catalog titles and create stars. As it shifts back to a song-driven business, as it was from 1900s to the late ‘50s, there is little motivation for labels to attempt to develop an act like Radiohead from the ground up. It used to be a Warner Music specialty; now it has been virtually abandoned at the music group.
Countless acts have experimented in the way Radiohead is now – expecially with live albums. But having to watch over the business and finance a recording can be a burdensome task. They eventually return to the label old even if it means the indie route.
Nearly four  years ago, Peter Gabriel and Brian Eno announced the creation of  Magnificent Union of Digitally Downloading Artists at the Midem conference in Cannes.
"Unless artists quickly grasp the possibilities that are available to them, then the rules will get written, and they'll get written without much input from artists," Eno said at the time.
What Gabriel and Eno envisioned was star artists stepping out of the album format and releasing EPs, demos, single songs, even sketches of songs. At the time they said this was not an alternative to label deals, just a way for musicians to take control and release music they way they see fit.
But it is obviously easier said than done: We’re still waiting for Gabriel and Eno to take advantage of digital possibilities — beyond quietly using their own websites. Radiohead will get the nod as the innovator.

If given a choice on how much to pay for music, as Radiohead will do with their next album, one might wonder how cheap or generous an act's fans might be. Jane  Siberry has an idea.
Siberry, who now goes by the name Issa, is getting $1.18 per song through her "self-determined pricing" system. She gives the listener the option to download music for free as a gift, pay the standard rate of 99 cents, pay now or pay later based on what you think of a tune.
Data from her website states that 19% of the people go for the freebie and 57% opt to pay later. Once they have the music, 80% pay 99 cents,  14% pay above suggested and 6% pay below.
Siberry even breaks down the costs of making music on her own:
STUDIO TIME
* 35-50/hour = 300/day
* So far for 33 songs: about 140 days in brussels/australia/toronto/vancouver
* Studio Patrons to date = $10,099

TOUR CD
disc = $1
sleeves = .25 (100% recycled envelope with window)

SELF-DETERMINED STORE PROTOTYPE
costs directly incurred to create model for other artists to use = $3500

SHEET MUSIC
$150/song

MP3 STORE
Set-up mp3s/artwork 10 songs = 3 hours@ $65

Sheeba, the name of the Siberry store and site, explains its philosophy:

"the principles of music are also principles for good living. expansive, generous and harmony-seeking.
goodness is a core human quality.
we are treating others as we wish be treated."