Link to Actual Article
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full article text from The Wall Street Journal:
A Historic Neil Young Concert, Captured by a Crowd-
Cobbling together a Carnegie Hall show for online–with some help
By JOHN JURGENSEN
Jan. 23, 2014 5:59 p.m. ET
On Jan. 7, Tom Adams went to see a Neil Young concert at Carnegie Hall by himself. It wasn't until days later that he made a connection with a group of other fans who attended. Like him, they had all secretly videotaped the solo acoustic performance, part of a four-night stand by Mr. Young, in his first return to the famed New York venue since 1973.
On Tuesday, Mr. Adams uploaded to YouTube a video of the entire two-hour show, which he had stitched together from footage captured by fellow concertgoers seated around the theater. Most of the video was shot by Mr. Adams, a video producer from Williamsburg, Mass., on a compact Canon camera perched on the railing in front of his $150 mezzanine seat (102, Row AA). All the videos were edited to match a single audio recording made at the concert, which Mr. Adams downloaded from an anonymous source on an online-sharing site.
With most everyone who goes to a concert now packing at least a camera phone, more fans are taking the next step to pool their shots and produce so-called crowdsourced concert videos. Though the legality of most of these projects is murky, some emerge with at least tacit approval from the bands. In 2006, the Beastie Boys helped popularize the concept by handing out cameras to audience members, with the resulting concert film released in theaters. A few years later, Radiohead fans cobbled together their scenes of a show in Prague, which was enhanced by a high-quality audio recording supplied by the band. And Nine Inch Nails devotees have slavishly produced multiple collaborative videos of their own.
Mr. Young views video recording as a scourge of the concert experience. "We find this sort of practice to be incredibly rude toward both the audience and the artist," says Elliot Roberts, the singer's longtime manager. Mr. Adams says he's sensitive to how disruptive hoisted phones and glowing screens can be, and that he's careful not to annoy other fans with his camerawork.
The main reason Mr. Adams sought out other people's footage was that there were holes in his own. During Mr. Young's delicate cover of the Phil Ochs song "Changes," he recalls, "I got a little too adventurous with the camera and one of the ushers came over and told me to put it away." After that, he positioned the camera more discretely on the floor, aimed through railing slats.
At home, he found fan-made videos of songs he was missing or wanted to supplement, then sent the users messages through YouTube asking their permission to borrow them. Then he wove the various clips into his own with editing software, making do with some glitches. During an anecdote by Mr. Young about a guitar with a bullet hole in it, the image is blurry and an on-screen message reads, "Stay tuned...video will return shortly."
Mr. Adams, 44 years old, says sharing the video with fans who couldn't attend the sold-out concerts (which some critics predicted will go down as a landmark in Mr. Young's career), takes him back to his pre-Internet days of trading cassette tapes of the singer's concerts by mail with like-minded fans.
To avoid raising the ire of Mr. Young's camp or coming across as "a creep doing this for financial gain," Mr. Adams prefaced the video with a note encouraging viewers to purchase the singer's official releases. He said he has already declined several email offers from people seeking to buy the video for bootleg concert DVDs.
Article by John Jurgensen at john.jurgensen@wsj.com
oh and here's the full 2hr concert film that all the hubbub is about - grab some popcorn and your favorite beverage:
Neil Young • Carnegie Hall, Solo Acoustic • 1/7/14 - FULL SHOW - crowd sourced concert film
