This weekend, Phish launched their first summer tour since the band went on hiatus in 2004. The tour began with a sold-out show at Boston’s Fenway Park on Sunday night, followed with a 3 night run at Jones Beach on Long Island, beginning last night.
Starting at 7:30pm, the Jones Beach show marked an unprecedented convergence between social media and live music. By doing a search for the term “Phish†on twitter, and real time sites such as TweetGrid.com, one could follow live tweets being made from fans inside the show on their mobile devices, many which were detailing the set list up to the minute as the first notes of the songs were being played.
As the show progressed, users both at the show and at home tweeted back and forth commenting on the songs and the show highlights. When “Mikes Song” (a fan favorite) opened the second set, tweets flooded in. When “Harry Hood” reached it’s climax (and unarguably the shows climax), the posts quieted down, most likely because users were too busy listening to/watching the show reach epic proportions.
Taking this online/offline convergence to another level, a fan only known as Jason took a shot at streaming the show live from his iPhone through phishtube, hosted by ustream.com, a free live streaming service. After a few technical issues in the beginning, the stream had a decent image of the stage, accompanied by better-than-decent sound. The number of people streaming last night’s show reached almost 3,500 people – Jones Beach’s capacity is 15,000. On ustream/phishtube you were able to watch a video of the show while reading the live twitter feeds, simultaneously side by side.
While there have been live broadcasts of Coachella and other music festivals, brought to us by corporate sponsors (which usually only broadcast the more popular acts), this could be the first time a show was documented in its entirety, live online by a fan, for other fans.
With a cult-touring scene scaling the entire country as well as entire summers, this social networking/ real-time communication can connect Phish fans both at home and at the shows on a whole new level. It will be interesting to see how the rest of the tour will progress through this new convergence of online and offline real-time conversation.
Contributed by Alison McCarthy
Image Credit: The Butter Room
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Plus, that dude busted a straight hilarious freestyle rap after the encore. It was absolutely awesome, he killed it.
Kudos, sir – I’m sure the band’s management will come after you, but it was an EPIC WIN
June 3rd, 2009 at 2:33 pm
Just wanted to warn you that cyber-criminals are using the popularity of the Phish concerts to trick phans into clicking on malicious links. According to PandaLabs research just released, if Twitter users click on the “PhishTube Broadcast†Trending Topic link on Twitter, they will see malicious comments published in the accounts created by the cyber-crooks. More details on this scam are here: http://bit.ly/17EJnr
Be careful out there!
June 3rd, 2009 at 2:45 pm
I’d like to thank Derek for the batteries!
June 3rd, 2009 at 5:15 pm
I’d also like to thank the operation #sneakyleak crew for freeing up the music and Derek the headlamp dude for coming through with the triple A’s….so clutch. Amazing to watch the show in real time from my living room in Cali.
Hopefully Phish’s management will recognize that there is a big opportunity for streaming their shows online to the masses. Perhaps they could offer up a digital pass for $10 that comes with a quality video stream and soundboard quality audio, then an MP3 or FLAC download of the show once it’s over.
The sneakyleak crew should definitely anticipate that Ustream will be getting a cease and desist after the visibility operation has received last night and consider getting some streams going on Justin.TV or stickam.com
@Michael_Irie
June 3rd, 2009 at 5:25 pm
This was EPIC. The video, the rap, the excitement generated on pretty much every real-time Phish tracking site, etc.
Seriously amazing work by Wig Man and special props to Headlamp Derek coming through with the batteries.
> I’m sure the band’s management will come after you
I’m sure not everyone would agree, but this type of “thin projection” [1] should actually stimulate demand for the live show. As Lefsetz, “you’ve got to be in the building.” [2]
[1] http://homes.eff.org/~barlow/EconomyOfIdeas.html
[2] http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/index.php/archives/2009/03/07/phish/
Not to mention, I think a big part of the excitement was that it was a grass-roots effort — by fans, for fans.
> I’d also like to thank the operation #sneakyleak crew
FWIW, it’s “Operation #LeakySecret,” not sneakyleak.
See here for reference…
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23LeakySecret
Can’t wait for Thursday!
TL
http://PhishTwit.com/
June 3rd, 2009 at 7:06 pm
Hey everyone.. thanks for all the love. This is epic.
@Michael_Irie… you are the man for telling me about the anticipatory back up streams in case they shut this down hard.
Thanks.
June 3rd, 2009 at 7:13 pm
This was the best, I went to the Fenway show and unfortunately I can’t go on tour (job,life,etc) But being able to share that kids good time was priceless. This is really a good thing, Phish should embrace it, in fact now I have to shell out the ten bucks to buy this show cause I know how sick it was!
June 3rd, 2009 at 7:19 pm
Phish 3.0 for sure!
Rouge live video is groundbreaking on so many levels. Truly amazing. Great work! I hope Phish Corp does the right thing and lets this go. I mean, it will be damn near impossible to police. “Sir your going to have to check your iPhone at the door.” ummmmm, NO! if anything it makes me wanna buy the soundboard and the tshirt and hell maybe even go to a show! ;)
June 3rd, 2009 at 10:00 pm
The convergence is coming. Are we ready?
What happened last night was incredible in terms of the mindshift that took place.
As others have noted, this wasn’t the first time a live stream went up of a show, but it was the first time we saw what happened from the perspective of someone who was there. No edits. No cuts. You saw what he saw. It wasn’t front row, hell when the lights went on you couldn’t even tell what it was. But all the phans did, and hopefully spread the word that this is what we’ve been waiting for. I swear I heard him mention sponsorship, which takes it to an entirely new level.
At the end of the show, He states something like “if i turn it off I’ll lose them” and at this point I got it. It wasn’t just about the show. I liked this guy. I felt I had shared the experience with him. It didn’t go to commercial. It didn’t pan out on a huge crane over the crowd (jet packs next time bro?)
As we think about our personal rights in these interesting times, at what point is our live, personal stream ours, and what part of it is owned by others? As smaller and ubiquitous tech (the only thing keeping this from happening more is the learning curve to jailbreak an iphone) becomes more prevalent, at what point does it become impossible, or even unnecessary, to try to squelch, as the volume of oncoming stream is simply more astounding. If “they” can watch and record us, any time, with no notification (if you’re in public, assume you’re being watched), when is that a right available to us?
A day not far off will enable this fairly simple exchange of bits (we’re just talking about audio/video streams, not transporter tech here) through a pair of glasses or contact lens, available instantly thru something like ustream to as many people as their bandwidth can handle. With this coming access, at what point is the drama of a tv show lost in a sea of HD-quality streams with positional surround and a full 180-degree field of view? If it works for a phish show, imagine all the peeps who would love to see the met streamed? Or some really hilarious guy at a wings game. Or your grandma, spending time with you and your kids. You get the picture.
I am on a personal search to develop this technology here in michigan to present this not only as a cheap web feed, but an immersive experience that requires only broadband. I seek any others out to help develop this idea further, or just let it help someone smarter with more money to take the idea and run with it. If you’re interested in moving this forward, please contact me. Jason, I’d love to have you on the board.
June 3rd, 2009 at 10:15 pm
The PhishTube guy has now streamed 4 shows (it would have been 5 but he couldn’t get a ticket for Camden). It’s amazing on a few counts.
1. The battery life on the iPhone is quite limited. Did he have a bunch of external batteries? Did he have a hookup from inside the venue?
2. AT&T’s service at Jones Beach was quite spotty. I was there for 2 of the shows, and had to make multiple attempts sending tweets. Does he have an inside connection, or a Verizon or Sprint wireless router?
Then, there was the question of legality.
1. Video recording applications on the current iPhone models is prohibited, which means the phone was jailbroken.
2. While Phish allows the audio of their shows to be recorded and freely distributed, they do not allow video. They also do not allow live streaming.
However, this went on for 4 shows, without Phish or UStream blocking @phishtube from continuing to do this. I expect some kind of official announcement from the band before the second leg of their summer tour commences in July, either allowing or banning such activity in the future.
Phish currently has some leniency toward this stance since they are not signed to a major record label. Their contract with Elektra/Atlantic/Warner ended after Undermind was released in 2004. The band announced the next album will be released through their own label, JEMP Records, and not through a major label.
June 10th, 2009 at 12:28 pm