My mindset was: They already did most of the work, just exporting the audio (that already exists!) would give them extra income. Could be a subscription service, or pay per album, or even for free (it's a marketing channel).
Some bands don't want their live recording out there (multiple reasons: from errors during the live show, or to keep the experience exclusive, or they think some people won't want to go to see them live if they already can listen to it). There is also the aspect of "If we release it for free or in the platform, we can't never make an actual live recording album", which could make some sense.
For years I dreamt about this "Netflix for unreleased live concerts" platform but I couldn't reach anything. Maybe I am really bad seller, and I just needed help from someone with more experience with the industry.
I ended up doing this unofficially for my faovurite artist, with the help of friends and collectors, uploading bootlegs (sometimes amateur recordings, sometimes board sound recording), and catalogued so you can search for all the plays of a particular song, or an album, how many times this song was played, if there was a guest, filter by country, city, year, etc, etc.
Which is not to say no concert should ever be recorded, but I could understand why it wouldn’t be a priority for some artists.
https://archive.org/details/KingGizzardAndTheLizardWizard
Plenty of other artists have free concert archives at https://archive.org/details/etree
Then again, the Dead were also pioneers of permitting and encouraging the bootleg scene.
(See my comment upthread about Fugazi and the unexpected encounter with Ian MacKaye after I stumbled upon an obscure YouTube recording)
Right after the show, you could buy fancy looking USB sticks, designed with unique elements of the artists, pre-loaded with the recording of the set you had just heard.
I still have a guitar-shaped USB stick from a Mark Knopfler show at a small venue in a tiny town in southern Germany. Honestly, it’s a far better souvenir than any picture I could have taken.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20150205231438/http://www.bleeck...
I saw David Byrne last week, during checkout for the ticket I would probably have paid an extra $10 to get access to the recording of that show.
But yeah, jam bands have really embraced this more than any other category of artist - it's quite common even among low-mid tier jam bands that every single show ends up on Nugs. These bands are often pretty friendly to recordists too (a recent show I was at has two recordings on the IA as well as the Nugs version. Everyone's happy!)
This has been done. Peter Gabriel, for example, did this on one of his tours (I think Back to Front, but I’m too lazy to dig it up). The California Guitar Trio also experimented with it.
I’m guessing the fact that it’s not a widespread practice is that the return on investment (and we’re talking strictly the additional costs beyond simply recording the show) didn’t justify the effort.
Yeah, I've been to low double-figure gigs[0] where they were selling soundboard CDs shortly after the gig. If I'm not mistaken, a bunch of them were being done by the same company (but an internet search is unproductive.)
[0] In London, I want to say late 2000s, early 2010s?