Bruce Springsteen fans might find their wallets a whole lot lighter thanks to the new site live.BruceSpringsteen.net. The project is a service that allows fans to download audio from archived Springsteen and The E Street Band shows. Although the current offerings only date back to 2012, it's expected to go back much further than that soon enough.
Springsteen's team was assisted on the project by nugs.net, a site that specializes in offering live concerts for download to fans. The same service helped Pearl Jam, Metallica and Phish make their shows available to fans following a performance. According to the site's CEO, Brad Sterling, it reached out to Springsteen during 2009-because of the legendary variety in playlist he offers from show to show-but he wasn't interested at the time. Sterling told Rolling Stone that The Boss changed his mind this year after realizing that fans could get all of the shows for free on YouTube anyway and he hoped to release better quality versions.
The shows will be available in a variety of formats: mp3 for $9.95, lossless for $12.95 and HD-Audio for $19.95. Most interesting perhaps is that all are available on actual physical CD's for $23. That may seem steep but offers a collectible not many fans can resist.
Sterling notes that Springsteen's service will go much further than those of other acts due to his lengthy career. That means, of course, that Bruce doesn't have all of the original master tapes or recorded version. He and nugs.net are working with fans to recover quality bootlegs that have been traded over the years so that Springsteen can offer them as a high quality download on the site.
Vinyl's great...but bootlegs have never gone out of style.
