Wofgang’s Vault offers free concert streams and copies to buy

Attention RIAA: Here is an example of the correct way to grow your business. The new site Wolfgang’s Vault offers free streams of classic to current concerts, and DRM free downloads for a reasonable price. You can listen to the entire show before you decide to buy. You don’t need a subscription or an annoyingly invasive player/media manager to access your downloads. You can play the media you buy on any device, and manage it any way you like.

But enough of that, the other really big thing is the content on Wolfgang’s Vault is stuff millions of fans could only get access to via illicit means (AKA bootlegs) in the past. The big labels never offered most of these recordings to the public at any price. Now it’s possible to buy high quality legit copies from an easily accessible source:

The additions were made possible through a deal between Universal Music Group (UMG) and Wolfgang’s Vault founder Bill Sagan. The recordings include live performances by UMG artists culled from thousands of concerts produced by late promoter Bill Graham, along with gems from other catalogs and archives dating back decades.

“This is a far-reaching agreement to make available what I would consider previously unreleased live performance recordings of Universal Music Group artists from the mid-’60s on through today,” Sagan told Billboard.com. “It covers hundreds of UMG performers and thousands of live performance concerts.”

Sagan launched the Web site in 2003 after acquiring Graham’s cache of memorabilia and concert recordings for $5 million. The downloadable content deal is for 10 years, with a streaming deal stretching “into perpetuity,” Sagan said.

If the concert is longer than 30 minutes, a full download is priced at $9.98, with concerts of less than 30 minutes at $5.98. Some one- or two-song performances cost $3.98. The site will continue to offer free streaming. (Yahoo)