(Vandenberg Communications) Beginning with Pearl Jam’s sold out concert at the Gorge in George, Washington on September 1, the band will begin releasing high quality digital downloads of their live shows exclusively at www.pearljam.com. The digital downloads will be available for most of the band’s 2005 Canadian and US dates just hours after each show has ended; they will include special downloadable artwork and a slideshow specific to each night’s show. Pearl Jam’s “digital bootlegs” will be professionally mixed in real-time at each show by Pearl Jam’s longtime studio and live engineer, Brett Eliason. Eliason’s company, Basecamp Productions, developed the software application that delivers and manages digital downloads. Pearl Jam has opted to encode the digital files at a higher than standard bit rate (192k) in an effort to balance manageable file sizes with very good sound quality. The cost is $9.99 per show.
The “digital bootlegs” are an extension of Pearl Jam’s official bootleg CD program which was launched on the band’s 2000 world tour; over three million bootlegs have been sold since the program’s inception. “The concept for the bootlegs has always been about providing high quality recordings of our shows at an affordable price for the fans who collect them. A lot of the band’s fans want to own a copy of the live show they saw in their hometown, or a particularly standout show they hear about from other fans. Making the bootlegs available in digital form is just a natural evolution for the bootleg CD program, and a response to more and more fans turning to the web to buy their music,” said the band’s manager, Kelly Curtis.
Pearl Jam's “digital bootlegs” are high resolution digital files that will be released without DRM (Digital Rights Management) so that fans can burn them to disc, transfer to them to MP3 players or an iPod, or play them from their hard drives. “The decision to exclude the DRM is unprecedented for a band of this size, but it’s consistent with the band’s sensibilities,” says Tim Bierman, manager of the Pearl Jam Ten Club, which will oversee the digital bootleg program. “We want to make it as hassle-free as possible for someone to listen to a show they’ve downloaded regardless of what music-playing device they use,” Bierman adds.
The technology supporting the “digital bootlegs” is provided by Basecamp Productions (www.basecampproductions.com). Basecamp Productions was founded by long-time Pearl Jam sound engineer Brett Eliason, and his business partner Joshua James. The company combines the expertise of Eliason - who was the technical architect of the Pearl Jam bootleg series from the 2000 and 2003 world tours with Basecamp Production’s proprietary software that delivers and manages digital downloads.
“The mission of Basecamp Productions is to provide artists with the ability to create their own branded online download systems so that they can sell high quality digital files through their websites, rather than re-directing traffic to a 3rd party website, explains Basecamp Productions' co-founder, Brett Eliason. He adds, “The Basecamp system integrates with the artists’ existing website, allowing fans to download music direct from the artist.”
