BBC: Royal Albert Hall archive preserved in £1m project. “The Royal Albert Hall’s archive has been saved from flooding and preserved in a £1m rescue operation. The South Kensington venue’s collection includes a trumpet from the opening ceremony 152 years ago and a programme designed by Pablo Picasso. The archive spans the venue’s history since its inception in the 1850s and consists of tens of thousands of items.”
404 Media: Why Scalpers Can Get Olivia Rodrigo Tickets and You Can’t. “The ‘verified fan’ concert ticket presale for pop sensation Olivia Rodrigo’s upcoming Guts Tour is today, and, yet again, it’s worth remembering that Ticketmaster stacks the deck heavily in favor of ticket scalpers, regardless of what the company says.”
Discovered on Mastodon: BluegrassArchive.com ( https://bluegrassarchive.com/ ). This Web site is plain as plain (just fine!) and filled with music. It’s a list of bluegrass music artists and live concerts for which you can get recordings. Click on the name of the artist and you’ll get a directory list of folders, one per concert. The folders I looked at had concerts divided up into songs. The audio files are in FLAC format. I looked up Carolina Chocolate Drops, and they had dozens of concerts available.
Internet Archive: Live Music Archive Collection Now Tops 250,000 Recordings. “The collection has steadily grown over the past 20 years as a collaborative effort between Internet Archive staff and dedicated, music-loving volunteers. At a pace of uploading nearly 30 items a day, the Live Music Archive reached the one-quarter million recording mark in June, and now takes up more than 250 terabytes of data on Internet Archive servers.”
TechCrunch: Roblox to host a free virtual Super Bowl concert featuring Saweetie. “Hip-hop artist Saweetie is performing exclusively in Roblox for the NFL’s Super Bowl LVII pregame on February 10, the National Football League announced today.”
Museums + Heritage Advisor: Royal Northern College of Museum’s archive project make thousands of recordings public. “The Royal Northern College of Music (RNCM) has announced a new archive project, Throwing Open the Concert Doors, which is set to conserve and digitise thousands of RNCM recordings, making them publicly available online and via a new interactive heritage booth installed at the College. Recordings of performances from student recitals to full scale opera productions dating back to 1973 will be conserved and digitised, some from magnetic reel and tape.”
Complete Music Update: US appeal court upholds Wolfgang’s Vault copyright ruling, including the disappointing damages. “The Second Circuit Appeals Court in the US has upheld a copyright infringement ruling against concert streaming service Wolfgang’s Vault. Which you might think would please the music publishers that sued the digital outfit, but no. Because the appeals court also upheld the unusually low damages pay out that the music rights owners were awarded.”
Sydney Morning Herald: ‘I became desperate’: the singer trying to recover her legacy from the ABC. “Marilyn Richardson, one of Australia’s finest ever opera singers, fears a chaotic approach to archiving at the ABC [Australian Broadcasting Corporation]– capped by a recent announcement of archivist staff cuts – could mean some of her historic performances have been lost forever. On one occasion, a family connection helped her track down a forgotten pile of recordings that had been left on a shelf in a locked room in a former ABC building in Adelaide.”
UCLA: New coast-to-coast series brings trailblazing Jewish musicians to audiences everywhere. “Secret Chord Concerts is a free on-demand video series featuring 15-25 minute performances from celebrated Jewish musicians representing a broad range of styles, heritages, and histories and recorded live in front of intimate audiences in Philadelphia and Los Angeles. Season 1 episodes will air the first Wednesday of every month from June until October.”
New-to-me, from The Crimson: Concert Archives is the ‘Goodreads’ Concert-Lovers Never Knew They Needed. “Similar to the way Goodreads creates an interactive and archivable reading experience, Concert Archives is a hybrid platform that allows users to catalog every concert they have attended on the app or website. In an interview with us, founder Justin Thiele describes it as the ‘home for concerts to live beyond just the time that you’re at a concert.’ Part crowd-sourced database and part social media, Concert Archives provides music lovers an innovative and unique way to find community while displaying their love of live music.”
NME: FAC launches database of venues charging zero commission on merch. “The Featured Artists Coalition (FAC) has announced a new directory highlighting music venues that charge zero commission on the sale of merchandise. Supported by Peter Hook, the ‘100% Venues’ database aims to address the ‘outdated and unfair’ practice of performance spaces taking a cut of acts’ merch proceeds at gigs.” This appears to be UK-only; the directory currently lists over 300 venues.
Billboard: Every 2022 Concert & Festival Canceled Due to COVID-19. “As announcements of cancellations and postponements roll in, we’re keeping track of the latest in this updating list. Below, find all the 2022 concerts and festivals that have been canceled or rescheduled due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. (These are listed in descending order of announcement, so find the latest cancellations at the very top.)”
ABC 13: Astroworld Fest: FBI portal goes online for photo or video uploads of the Houston concert disaster. “On Friday, more than two months after the deadly concert surge at NRG Park, the Houston Police Department announced the establishment of a public-facing FBI website, urging those who have any photos or video taken at the concert venue back on Nov. 5, 2021, to upload them to the portal.”
Al Dia Music: COVID-19 infections confirmed at Bad Bunny concerts. “Last weekend, Bad Bunny performed live for the first time since beginning of the pandemic in Puerto Rico. At least 80,000 people attended at the Hiram Bithorn stadium, and at least 176 of them have now tested positive for COVID-19, according to the Puerto Rico Department of Health.”
Rolling Stone: Brett Eldredge, Billy Strings Cancel Shows as Omicron Variant Surges. “As the spread of the Omicron variant reignites fears about another wave of Covid outbreaks in the U.S., the ongoing pandemic continues to throw a wrench into the normal operations of touring artists in the country and Americana sphere. Billy Strings and Brett Eldredge both canceled shows this week — in Nashville and Chicago, respectively — due to positive Covid cases within their circles.”
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