Live Show Downloads - as natural as granola in the morning

by Malcolm Petch
You’ve been to the live show at Streaming Café, and you’re laughing and chatting with your friends as you leave for the night. You’re full of joyful satisfaction after a wonderful evening of live music and good food. If only there was a way to hold on to this feeling…

Now there is.

We here at Streaming Café are happy to unveil our online music store in conjunction with Bandcamp. As an extension of our mandate to discover, connect and promote independent artists, we’ve partnered with several of our guest musicians to offer downloadable selections from their live performances.

Here’s a bit of history: we started multi-tracking our shows at the end of last year in order to have the ability to remix audio for our YouTube videos. After a while we realized that a lot of the performances we had on tape were remarkably good and very much worth releasing to the general public in a format other than the YouTube videos we’ve been doing. We started a dialogue with some of the artists to see whether this was something they’d be agreeable to. And they’ve jumped at the opportunity, so we’ve got their music up and ready for you.

Basically, our thought has been to offer another resource to the artist, with no cost to them, that they in turn could offer to their fans. And they, the artists, receive a direct split of any proceeds (with no deductions for packaging or distribution or damage, etc etc). The world is full of places which will try to charge the artist something for an opportunity to market their own songs (which they already own, after all), and we figured this was something we could do to give indie artists a leg up.

For everyone else, it means we can enjoy the highlights of some of our favourite shows whenever we want, with all the energy of being live-in-the-moment. The live music is remixed and even mastered to make it as high quality as possible – but it’s still LIVE, with no auto-tuning and no edits or punch-ins; this is as natural as granola in the morning. And we all as fans can keep these live performances on our iPods or computers or whatever as long as we want to.

It’s kinda like nabbing a bootleg recording, except the quality is really good and the artist isn’t getting ripped off in the process.

Did you miss an artist you really wanted to see? Do you want to re-live the fabulous evening you had at Streaming Café? Check out our store – the artist you’re looking for may already have their music available there, and we’re adding new ones virtually every week. http://store.streamingcafe.net/