When I get asked this question, it’s usually by young bands who have developed something of a following through touring, by being really active with their online promotion (typically via MySpace) and by keeping and maintaining a healthy and regular online mailing list.

Their idea is that they would like to perform concerts that fans in other geographic locations could ‘attend’ by going to their website and watching a live webcast of the event. Their second choice is usually to record the concert and post it on YouTube (or similar) and embed it on their site.

Now, it has to be said that live streaming is generally expensive, resource intensive and a bit of a pain - especially if you want more than a few people to watch at once. There are solutions to that, which I’ll discuss - but it’s worth mentioning that there are all sorts of other variations on the theme.

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You are, of course, familiar with the Long Tail principle - Chris Anderson’s now famous idea that attempts to explain what happens to hits and niche products when things like the scarcity of retail shelf space go out the window thanks to the internet.

There was an extremely good and important article, which was then developed into a fairly good book (which kind of amounted to the article with a bit more colouring-in and some more examples), and has continued as a very interesting blog.

In short: as more products become available (thanks to the internet), more people check out what’s going on down the shallow end of the curve - the tail. The tail lengthens and expands.

But what most people seem to have missed is the fact that this is not some announcement of a brave new world for the independent niche musician. In fact, the extent to which this has been misunderstood virtually amounts to some sort of mass self-deception based solely on a wildly creative interpretation of the text and a bucketload of wishful thinking.

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The Wired Blog points to the Herculean effort of one Cliff Bolling who has been digitising his collection of 78s and uploading them for the world to listen.

The thousands of files are at 128kbps (though Cliff has been saving the source WAV files to DVD) and the ID3 metadata tags are just begging to be reworked so that artist and title display properly in iTunes, etc. - but what a heroic and selfless act. The man deserves a medal.

Listening to the music itself is like a window into a time not so far gone in history, but it’s largely been buried because it’s simply not economically viable to release this stuff in large quantities on CD. This is, I’d argue, what the internet is best at - and why we need to change copyright.

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This is about compression. Not the sort of compression that makes file sizes smaller, though the two types are often confused. Audio compression reduces dynamic range (the difference between loud and soft) in order to make recordings sound ‘punchier’ or - at least perceptually - louder.

One of the advantages of a louder sounding recording is to make albums more ‘impressive’. This is often considered particularly important on smaller speakers, through radio, or via mp3 where most users are not listening in ideal conditions (ie: on little headphones, on the bus).

But audiophiles - and, increasingly, just people who like music - are complaining that too much compression and not enough dynamic range is killing the quality of recorded music. And they kind of have a point.

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