Country music is derived from or imitates the folk style of the southern U.S. or of the Western cowboy. Folk songs, on which country music is based, are traditional songs that are typically characterized by stanzaic form, refrain, and simplicity of melody. Blues are songs of lamentation usually characterized by 12-bar phrases and 3-line stanzas in which the words of the second line usually repeat those of the first, as well as the continual occurrence of blue notes in melody and harmony. Rock often incorporates elements of country, folk, and blues to compose popular music usually played on electronically amplified instruments and characterized by a heavily accented beat and much repetition of simple phrases.
There are many music venues, such as the gentle green slope of a city's park, a sports stadium, or a smoky bar, in which music from these genres is performed live before an audience. Unlike a studio where quality audio recordings can be properly made, often these live performances are recorded by a fan's tape recorder, which bootleg recording is typically of poor condition and illegal. Even if these live performances were recorded by better instruments, however, they would typically not be immediately available for members of the audience to legally purchase and pick up. Often, it takes days after a live performance for which members of the audience have ordered the music for a compact disc to arrive in the mail. However, FIG. 1 illustrates an instance 100 where recordings of live performances can be made available after only 20 to 30 minutes to members of the audience.
While a live performance is given at the music venue 102, one or more microphones placed at the music venue transmit the speech and music from the live performance to a truck 106 or other facilities within proximity to the music venue 102. There are recording devices on the truck 106 or other facilities to record the speech and music as picked up by the microphones. The speech and music are burned onto a compact disc 108, which is an optical storage medium for digital data, usually audio.
Today many people are downloading music in digital form to their computer over the Internet using popular Web sites, such as iTunes® from Apple Computer, Inc. The major problem with the Internet is the difficulty of ensuring that only authorized individuals are allowed to download music. Without resolution to the problem of obtaining high quality media from live performances, such as music, that can be taken away as a memento of the experience, users may resort to tape recording live performances without authorization and organizations may forgo digital media distribution, causing demand for legal copies to diminish in the marketplace. Thus, there is a need for a system, method, and computer-readable medium for distributing live performances while avoiding or reducing the foregoing and other problems associated with existing systems.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds