Jazz Odyssey

Speaking of Bit Torrent….

King Crimson fans rejoice…the ever innovative Robert Fripp has launched the new DGM website which features a download service of audio concerts from his archives. Live recordings of King Crimson from 1971 up through 2000 as well as solo Fripp Soundscape performances and various Crimson offshoot projects are available at $9.95 in MP3 format and $12.95 in lossless FLAC format. Registered users are also able to download “Hot Tickles” which are free MP3s featuring shows available through the service (registration for the site is free and there is no obligation to buy anything).

What makes this service so unique is that you have a choice of digital delivery mechanism. Once you’ve made your purchase, you can download the concert one track at a time from your web browser, or you can grab the entire show using Bit Torrent. I believe this is the first legitmate music download service that makes use of the incredibly easy and efficient Bit Torrent protocol–I purchased the download of the legendary 6/28/74 show, choose Bit Torrent as the delivery mechanism and was download at a rate of over 400 kB/s, which gave me the complete 500 meg show on my harddrive in about 20 minutes. By using subscribers as edge servers through Bit Torrent, DGM saves on bandwidth costs and the consumer is rewarded with faster delivery.

DGM Live replaces the King Crimson Collector’s Club, which was a mail order service for live and rare archival projects relating to King Crimson. That club proved to be financially unsustainable, as the roughly 3,000 regular paying members weren’t enough to cover the costs involved in production. Fripp’s dotcom era venture BootlegTV (which promised audio and video of nearly every show from the then current Crimson lineup) never launched, so this new service seems to address the impracticalities of these two ventures with a compelling, technically sound and forward-thinking distribution mechanism, and a catalog that is chock full of sonic delights (and more to follow).

This is an interesting DIY business model…perhaps there are even incentives to be offered to DGM Live Bit Torrent users who share enough purchased content to hit certain thresholds that give them access to discounts and/or bonus content. After all, with no packaging and shipping charges, the main hard costs are production/restoration of the audio and bandwidth to deliver the content. Bit Torrent can all but eliminate the bandwidth cost to DGM.

I hope this venture has positive manifest functions for Fripp and DGM…his career has given the world some of the most challenging, creative and truly progressive music, but his career has been systematically undermined by a label and touring infrastructure built by big business that is inconsistent with Fripp’s music, goals and ultimately his life as a professional musican. His frustrations with the music industry are well documented at his diary (really one of the first ever music blogs) along with other fascinating insights into his life, his creative process and philosophies. Checking his diary for updates is still the first thing I do when I get online each day….