The Hardest Working Man on New Years Eve / In The Butter Room with Brad Serling of Nugs.net

With the end of the year upon us, we reached out to the hardest working man on New Years Eve, Brad Serling of Nugs.net. Brad will be in Atlanta for New Years with Widespread Panic for their annual NYE gig so LiveWidespreadPanic.com can serve up FLAC and MP3 downloads of their show 48 to 72 hours after Panic finishes their encore. In addition to Panic, nugs.net will also be offering New Years shows from Umphrey’s McGee, moe., The Radiators, Yonder Mountain String Band, Tea Leaf Green, and Hot Buttered Rum.

The New York Times described Nugs.net as “A Johnny Appleseed of online concert recordings.” In case you are not fan of the jambands, Nugs.net offers soundboard recordings of complete live performances for a whole host of artists from the Grateful Dead to Metallica. I had the opportunity to work with Brad back in ‘03 on Musictoday’s Digital Download platform.

Kevin and I thank Brad for his time and thorough response.

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2008 will be 15 years since you founded nugs.net. What’s the biggest thing that has changed in your experience with music downloading and music distribution since 1993?

Brad Serling: Ubiquitous broadband. My initial concept for nugs.net was a place to facilitate tape trading. In fact, the real genesis was a project I did with the guys who ran the Grateful Dead public FTP site at Berkeley. This was an unofficial Deadhead’s repository of all things Dead. I set up a folder there for tape traders to upload 30 second samples of their best Dead tapes as .AU files (the defacto audio format of the day). This was pre-MP3. The project never really took off, but it illustrates what a limiting factor bandwidth was back then. Now you can download a three hour concert in MP3 format in under five minutes. Pretty amazing leap!

What has been the best day and the worst day for Nugs.net?

Brad: The best day was New Year’s Eve 2002 at Madison Square Garden when the lights went down at Phish’s return from hiatus. I was set up next to one of my heroes, longtime Phish sound engineer Paul Languedoc, at the soundboard with my laptop, ready to capture that night’s show at 24 bit / 96KHz resolution, which Phish had never done before. I was so excited to see the band come back from hiatus, and frankly could not believe that they were allowing me to record the show and sell it the next day on LivePhish.com. The worst day was 24 hours later. I was frantically trying to get the New Year’s show up on LivePhish.com, bandwidth at the hotel was spotty, my wife somehow got a 24 hour flu, and I realized there was a major bug in my code which would prevent all those who pre-ordered the Phish New Year’s run from downloading it. Somehow we had to get on a plane to Hampton, VA for the next three shows and start the process all over again. We got to Hampton later that day and found a data center there who let me upload the shows on their high speed connections in exchange for tickets to that night’s show. By the next day the first two shows were up and I was able to patch the bug in the code after taking a beating from hard core fans in the forums and mailing lists. The deluge of emails and posts saying “I could’ve made a better LivePhish.com” was brutal to say the least. Talk about peer review. After all, I had been a taper since I was 14, and here I was living the tapers’ dream: officially engaged by the band to record and distribute their shows. High stakes for any starry eyed fan.

You are going to be in Atlanta for the Widespread Panic New Years Eve show, which will be available for download shortly after on LiveWidespreadPanic.com. Can you walk us through the entire process of producing a show for download?

Brad: The process really runs the gamut for each band. With Widespread Panic we do more production than most of our other artists. Panic’s front of house engineer Chris Rabold and system tech C.W. record the show in a variety of formats and hand off a 24bit / 48KHz stereo mix to me on DVD after the show. The mix is an on-the-fly blend of the house PA and stereo mics positioned at the soundboard. After the show I’ll usually forgo the typical beer and chicken wings backstage and head back to the hotel and start working on the show. I’ll load the full show onto my laptop and first make sure the show is complete, with no cuts or dropouts (it happens). Then I will drop markers for each song, add fades at the start and end of each set, and start the mastering process to even out the levels in order to make better sounding MP3s. Once the show is edited and rendered down to 16bit / 44.1 KHz WAV files for each track, I encode to MP3 and FLAC, tag all the files with artwork and metadata for that show, create the MP3 30 second samples, generate MD5 checksums for each file, and begin the publishing process. Once it’s staged on our servers, I test the download from start to finish and then send it live to the public. Then I will schedule an email announcement to the Live WP list to let fans know the show is ready. The Live WP site then auto-features the latest show on the homepage and show catalog, and auto publishes to LiveDownloads.com and nugs.net to increase traffic and visibility. Our art department then creates the downloadable labels and creates a set for the physical CDs. I then burn off a set of CD masters to fedex to our mastering house to fulfill all the CD orders for that show. If I’m lucky I’m asleep before daylight.

If I’m not at the show, the process takes several days as we’re waiting for the fedex of the DVD to come from the road. Bands who do their own editing and mastering can upload directly from the road, but for Panic we handle all the production and mastering so an upload of the raw files would take too long.

Is Panic going to dip into their archives anytime soon?

Brad: Absolutely. The band has already begun the selection process and we will be releasing shows on LiveWidespreadPanic.com as MP3 and FLAC downloads, as well on CD and CD+MP3 bundles where you can download the MP3 immediately and get the CD in the mail.

LivePhish.com had to be a significant event for Nugs.net. How did your relationship with Phish develop?

Brad: It’s funny, that’s probably the question I get asked most often. People assume I must have been buddies with the band or a friend of a friend, which is not the case at all. I was a fan just like everyone else, and even though I had been seeing Phish since 1990 I did not know anyone in the band or Phish organization. I was just a fan who did a really good job of releasing their music for free with their permission and without ripping them off. That’s what drew them to me. Actually, the Grateful Dead were the first to reach out to me. They called me up one day in 2000 and invited me up to their headquarters because they loved what I was doing with the nugs.net fan site. Three million free MP3 downloads a month of their music certainly got their attention. The fact that I was clearly doing it as a labor of love is what sealed the deal. The Dead hired me as a consultant and they had passed my name on to Dionysian, Phish’s management company. John Paluska, Phish’s manager, invited me to dinner before the “first last show ever” at Shoreline in 2000 and the rest, as they say, is history.

Can you give us a glimpse of what Phish might release in 2008 through LivePhish.com?

Brad: Currently Phish Archivist Kevin Shapiro is working on remasters of some of our most popular archive releases, like Nutter 97 and Durham 93. The remasters will come out on CD and new downloads and CD+MP3 bundles like our previous six releases. Aside from that, there are of course many shows in the queue. I keep pulling for Hampton 97, but it has yet to see the light of day. Kevin did play the epic Halley’s on our anniversary Phishcast yesterday, so thanks Kevin!

You launched the Nugs.net download service for The Philadelphia Orchestra earlier this year. What has been the level of interest in comparison to your rock n’ roll client base? Has it met/exceeded/fallen short of your expectations?

Brad: The Orchestra was a great opportunity and a great client, but certainly a grand experiment for us. I am from Philadelphia and my partner still lives there, so it was a natural connection. Incidentally, the Philadelphia Orchestra was the first orchestra to make an electronic recording of their music in the early 1900s, so it was a natural for them to be the first orchestra to directly distribute their performances to fans on their own web site.

In terms of quantifying success, Metallica it ain’t, to say the least. I have never done any market research on the classical music download market at large so I really have nothing to compare it to in order to gauge the success. My criteria for success is simple: is my client happy and are they reaching their fans and making them happy? By those metrics, the Orchestra is a huge success.

What are your top 3 recommendations in the nugs.net catalog?

Brad: Wow, that’s tough. I’ll stick with what my go-to shows I suppose—the ones I find myself listening to most often. (1) Hot Tuna from last year’s Merlefest. Just a spectacular recording and great acoustic performance. (2) Umphrey’s McGee New Year’s 04. I think I’m addicted to their cover of Sledgehammer, which is funny because I was never a huge fan of the Peter Gabriel’s original version. But the whole show is phenomenal and it’s another great sounding recording. (3) Grateful Dead at Family Dog from 1970. I’m a sucker for any 1970 Dead, and this is an awesome snapshot of the band in their prime with some nice filler thrown in from later in the year for good measure. And, of course, it sounds great too because it was mixed down from the multitrack tapes they literally found one day in the corner of the Vault.

When not seeing shows or working, you are __________?

Brad: Listening to shows ;-) Either that or playing guitar or attempting to play the mandolin.

What plans do you and Nugs.net have for 2008?

Brad: If I told you, I’d have to kill you.

How much horsepower does it take to serve up all of that audio? What’s the platform?

Brad: I’m platform agnostic, and I’ve learned the hard way not to put all my eggs in one basket.

What’s your ideal solution to copyright, fair use, and the controversies surrounding DRM?

Brad: How much time do you have? Honestly that’s beyond the scope of this discussion, so I would simply state that in any economy there are those who will always steal no matter what the price and those who will always pay given a fair price for the product or service they are interested. It’s called capitalism. The music business is no exception. Nugs.net is successful because we offer a reliable service of selling you last night’s show at a fair price. People rip us off all the time by illegally posting our artists’ intellectual property on file sharing sites, but those people would never pay for it anyway. Nevertheless, plenty of people want to support their favorite artist and know that by giving us their credit card they are putting money directly in their heroes’ pockets. That’s the intersection between art and commerce and we operate in that crosshair.

Is your business threatened by piracy? If so how and from where? If not, how do you manage to avoid it?

Brad: You’d be burying your head in the sand to say you can avoid piracy or that you have a way to prevent it. It’s not a study in ethics but rather factor of market forces.

Did you have an “aha” moment that gave birth to nugs or is it more like an idea you’ve nutured over time and whose time has come? Did you just look around the expanding taping sections, see hundreds of mic booms, and say “yeah, there’s a market here?”

Brad: I wish I could claim to be that smart. In reality, it was really more self-serving, yet selfless at the same time. When I hear something I like, my first thought is that I need to play this for my friends and turn them on to it. That’s the genesis of nugs.net. When I launched the nugs.net web site, it was a way for me to share my tape collection. I couldn’t keep up with all my friends’ requests for copies of my tapes so I built a web site to let them download copies themselves. I used to spend entire weekends in college copying tapes for people (this was before you could burn CDs). Once I entered the real world, I didn’t have that kind of time anymore so I needed a way to share my music more easily.

What is your favorite period or episode in history and why?

Brad: Right now. I can’t think of a more exciting time given all the technology at our fingertips. Politically and socially it may be the scariest time since the dawn of man, which might explain why we’re living in a tech-wonderland right now.