Australian alternative rocker Courtney Barnett might be a relatively “new” artist (her first single was in 2013 and she has only released two studio albums to date), but she is already starting to catalogue her concert career.
Through the Courtney Barnett Online Live Music Experience & Archive, she is making available a large number of concert recordings dating back to 2007, with many sourced from the mixing desk or from TV appearances. On top of this she has gathered together many of the posters that were created for one-off shows and tours. There is also a wealth of live and backstage photos peppered throughout.
Fans can search the timeline by album, by year or by specific date, with every show she has played over the past 14 years marked down and, where available, illustrated with photos, posters, videos and audio recordings.
At the start of 2020, the Radiohead Public Library opened, serving as a central depository for pretty much everything relating to their career, structured around albums and pulling together fan newsletters, YouTube uploads and even old T-shirts that were made available again on a print-on-demand basis. Then at the start of this year, Def Leppard created their Vault, doing something similar and offering up a rich digital history of their career.
These are major (as well as costly and time-consuming) endeavours to get off the ground and to keep running. The trend, for now at least, is towards making everything free to access and using it all as a way to reward fan loyalty while often working as a D2C shop window. The Neil Young Archives might be subscription-based (costing between $19.99 and $99.99 a year depending on the level of access you want), but have the added advantage of offering access to Young’s enormous but meticulously maintained recording archives.
What is different – and most endearing – about what Barnett has done here is that there is a fan submission section where they can add photos, videos and audio (with no copyright lawyers waving a judgemental finger) from shows they attended. If anything is used on the site, they will be credited. This UGC element gives fans a sense of ownership and makes it all a very lo-fi and welcomingly collaborative effort, very much in the spirit of Barnett’s music.
