The Live Album Era

Not all live albums are created equal. There are at least three different strategies for putting together and commercially justifying a live album. There’s the “one moment in time” concept, a live document of a single night (or a handful of nights in some cases) as an historical document of an era or a tour or an event. Then there’s the “greatest hits live” concept, a greatest hits package but with new live versions, often culled from whole tours and even different segments of an artist’s career. There’s a third group that I would ungenerously call “cash grabs”: There wasn’t time to record new music and get it on the market before the Q4 buying season, so they stuck together a bunch of live recordings of the most recent release and figured they could extract a little cash from the completists.

I might get to the others at some point. The ones I’ve picked for this week are mostly in the “one moment in time” concept.

Most of this batch are synonymous with classic rock. I think that’s because there used to be a lot more distance between a well-made record and a good-sounding live show. There are lots of good live records from the modern era but the sequenced, click-tracked, choreographed nature of a lot of modern live shows keeps it from sounding very distinct from the originals. Plus your costly commercial product is competing with pretty much any dummy who has a phone and a Youtube channel so it’s more difficult to make the official live recording stand out.