Ministers of sound

Music, like love, is best experienced in the flesh. Sometimes, alas, it's not so convenient - while driving, for instance - so we must search out the next best thing. For many, MP3s are the musical equivalent of a hairy kiss from a maiden aunt: it's music, yes, but it lacks a bit. So many fans have turned to swapping music in another file format: music recorded from concerts, with the permission of bands.

The file format is called Shorten, and is a lossless compression format. So while the files are relatively small, they don't lose any musical fidelity. MP3s, on the other hand, use a "lossy" compression technique - they save on space by missing out some of the detail.

It works like this: some bands - Phish and The Grateful Dead being two - allow concert goers to tape the show. Many even provide "taper tickets" with good acoustics for those with the recording gear (mostly professional quality DAT equipment). This recording is then encoded as a Shorten file.

The bands give permission for people to share these files, but only on a person-to-person basis. They can be placed on someone's own server and distributed via the file transfer protocol, or FTP. The shared files can be downloaded, and either listened to directly, using Shorten software, or converted to another format and burnt on to a CD.

It's quietly popular. Sites such as Etree.org compile lists of FTP sites, and the Internet Archive provides hosting for bands willing to go further and ignore the person-to-person-only rule.

Either way, the bands - and the fans - are eager to allow sharing without anyone making any money. The Grateful Dead says: "The Grateful Dead and our managing organizations have long encouraged the purely non-commercial exchange of music taped at our concerts and those of our individual members _ Our stipulations regarding digital distribution are merely extensions of those long-standing principles and they are as follows: No commercial gain may be sought by websites offering digital files of our music_"

The sharing of live music is a relatively low-key affair - needing people with the right equipment, and the skills and patience to do it. But soon, the world of live recordings may get rather more interesting. Last week, Clear Channel, the American radio and concert promotion giant, was reported to be preparing plans to offer live recordings of concerts on CD, at the venue, five minutes after the curtain falls. According to a report in the Boston Globe, by recording directly off the sound mixing desk, and using a bank of cheap CD burners, they will be able to sell concert goers perfect recordings.

The scheme is reportedly to be piloted in small venues in spring with, most likely, the first MP3s appearing on file-sharing networks around 30 minutes later.

And there lies the rub. For bands whose main audience is the live one, allowing fans live recordings of the previous night's show could be a winner. For the more possessive record labels, it's a potential nightmare. When stadia could shift 20,000 CDs in an evening and provide free advertising for the rest of the tour, it is so potentially lucrative, it might just be the one that forces labels to reconsider their policy towards file sharing.