Calling Kiss' 1975 album Alive! a concert collection is one of rock's favorite inside jokes. After all, says the producer Eddie Kramer, the original concert tapes were so tuneless that the only genuine live tracks on the album are the drums. But the album's dubious origins did not stop Alive from cracking Billboard magazine's Top 10 and giving the heavy metal band its first Top 20 single.
Back in the 1970s, live albums were a staple of the music charts, often moving relative unknowns like Peter Frampton and Cheap Trick into superstardom. Today, live albums do not have the same hit-making power, victims of concerts that cater to the MTV generation by emphasizing visual excitement over musical thrills, and of labels that drop bands before they even have a set list worthy of a live album.
Yet concert albums are proliferating, just of another breed. Rather than breaking an artist onto radio and into the mainstream, these live albums - sometimes dozens from a single group - are used to subvert a consolidating radio industry and its increasingly homogenized play lists.
Groups like Pearl Jam and Phish use live recordings to build and reward loyalty among diehard supporters. At the same time, they are undercutting a bootleg market that has boomed with the rise of the Internet.
Phish just released volumes 13-16 in its Live Phish series. After its last tour, Pearl Jam issued 72 live albums, one for almost every show; the band is planning to do the same when it hits the road next year to support the album Riot Act, due Tuesday.
This month also sees the release of Live at Folsom Field Boulder, Colorado, Dave Matthews' sixth concert album in fewer than 10 years, and Bob Dylan's Live 1975: The Rolling Thunder Revue, the latest installment in a series of live CDs from the rock icon.
To be sure, traditional concert albums have not disappeared. Garth Brooks and Bruce Springsteen released successful live CDs in recent years. But singles culled from live albums - like Cheap Trick's "I Want You to Want Me," from 1979's Live at Budokan - are rarely heard on Top 40 radio.
Live recordings, instead of putting bands on the airwaves, are used by bands to circumvent radio's restrictive programming.
"It's looking after the people who've looked after you," said drummer Andy Williams of the British group Doves. His band is offering a live show for free download to everyone who bought a concert ticket on its fall tour.
Traffic in unauthorized live recordings has proved fan interest runs deep for many bands' concert material, particularly groups like Phish that alter their shows nightly with improvisational sets.
The advent of portable, relatively inexpensive digital recorders has made it easy to surreptitiously record concerts. Recordings are then burned to CD or swapped online, sometimes within days of the show.
Fans who are not plugged into the trading network can buy unauthorized copies of shows from bootleggers, often for $20 or more a CD. Lengthy concerts by artists like Springsteen fetch $75.
"Pretty much every show we've ever done is available out there" in unauthorized form, said Kelly Curtis, Pearl Jam's manager.
Pearl Jam decided to undercut the bootleggers. With next to no marketing, the band sold two-CD sets in stripped-down packaging for $11 through its Web site. Retail stores offered the CDs as well, though most did not carry all 72 titles, which were released in two batches in 2000 and 2001. No singles were issued.
It is not just the number of live-rock albums bands release that is changing - it is the albums' very nature.
Live albums have often been ideal representations. Producers create fantasy sets intended to appeal to a broad audience by stitching together the best performances from different nights or different eras.
The Phish and Pearl Jam series, as well as archival concert releases from the Grateful Dead (who have released almost 50 live albums) and Jimi Hendrix, are niche-oriented documentary projects. Instead of representations of tours, dedicated fans can often buy the very shows they attended, in their entirety.
Pearl Jam's first bootleg series appeared three months after tour stints ended. Curtis hopes to cut that to three weeks on the next outing. Eventually he wants to remove the gap altogether.
"I kind of envision a time that you'll be able to just almost stream it live and get it out immediately, where you're not even going through the process of putting it on disc."