Wired magazine put on the Jeff Tweedy and Lawrence Lessig show earlier this week with all the theatrical trappings of a rock-and-roll extravaganza, with tickets sold out online in minutes and lines down the block. The “Who Owns Culture” discussion, moderated by Steven Johnson, took place not at the Beacon or one of the other New York performance palaces, but at the New York Public Library.
Tweedy knows the ups and downs—mostly downs—of the recording industry. His recording label dropped his band, Wilco, just before a tour in 2001. The band streamed its next album on its website and another rock band learned the Grateful Dead business model: the real money’s in performance. David Carr sums up the response:
The resulting concerts were a huge success: Mr. Tweedy remembered watching in wonder as fans sang along with music that did not exist in CD form. Then something really funny happened. Nonesuch Records decided to release the actual plastic artifact in 2002. And where the band’s previous album, “Summerteeth,” sold 20,000 in its first week according to SoundScan, “Yankee” sold 57,000 copies in its first week and went on to sell more than 500,000. Downloading, at least for Wilco, created rather than diminished the appetite for the corporeal version of the work.
Jerry Garcia mentioned more than once that the Grateful Dead were in the transportation business, not the music business. In the attention economy, acts like Wilco that latch onto this idea will thrive; those that don’t will wither.
Update—10 April 2005 01:15PM CST: It occurs to me that clarification is needed for the millennials out there. The Grateful Dead encouraged fans to tape their shows and trade them noncommercially. The band felt its job at a live show was to transport the audience, and that they did.
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