The Smiley Smile Message Board

It was a good idea.  Frustrating that it couldn't get done.

Now the Stones have done it:

http://stonesarchive.com/

I really wish they would do something like this.

And it's still "coming soon".
The Stones have the rights of their post 1971 material.
Now, they have a contract with Universal, but they're doing it. Great for them!
Beach Boys released a great ammount for their vaults with this Smile Sessions.
Hopefully they'll release more next year. The Capitol press release and Al's interview stated: Smile Sessions is a beginning of their 50th anniversary projects.
It'll be great if they launch this site one day, they're still paying for the domain (still online). 

Good for the Stones!

$7 for a nicely cleaned up and shiny sounding boot (I have an old vinyl boot of that same show and it sounds like hell) when they could have put out an expensive CD issue: not bad at all!

I wonder if the Beach Boys Central will still happen. Launching it as part of the 50th anniversary perhaps?

Yeah that stones release is a total winner as it was one of my favourite boots. Agreed it would be great to see bb central up and running. It wouldn't surprise me if other artists now follow suit, beach boys included.

The Stones are the only long time band doing this.  King Crimson / Robert Fripp have opened their vaults for the last 12 years first with a Collectors Club of archival CD releases, and then a few years ago, they wisely started doing downloads.  Now you can get countless board tapes, multitracks, sessions, radio broadcasts, audience tapes, studio stuff, you name it.  Every day it seems they come out with more stuff.  Downloads are FLAC or MP3 and they often offer a free track to listen to.

Check it out here.
http://www.dgmlive.com/archive.htm?&name=crimson

I think many more artists/bands are going to start doing this.  It's a much better way to make money vs. the old CD route and they completely eliminate packaging, shipping, and other related costs.  You can also get away with releasing ANYTHING online whereas it might be strange to print up 3,000 CDs of a bunch of sessions that only a few hundred might buy.  Plus there's no inventory to worry about.

Hendrix too

http://www.myplaydirect.com/jimi-hendrix

Nothing beats this:

http://www.archive.org/details/GratefulDead

Honestly the band that should really consider doing this is The Beatles.  Paul McCartney recently put up an archive of sorts but according to the Sulpy boards it's not going to be for the public's consumption. 

Seriously though if The Beatles ever made their entire archives available for download they'd make a killing.  Something to consider though, in these politically correct times there would be certain studio banter and outtakes encompassing all bands that would be better off under lock and key.  So any band attempting to set up an archival site of any type of magnitude would probably have to go through their archives with a fine toothed comb eliminating any potential buzz/taboo words or phrases that they wouldn't want out there.

Another band who made this: Red Hot Chilli Peppers started selling their 2011 shows, properly mixed
http://www.livechilipeppers.com/

Take 1 of Elvis Presley's version of US Male comes to mind as something that would never be released except on bootlegs. It breaks down after about a minute and a half and the band immediately jumps into a somewhat politically-incorrect version of The Prisoner's Song.

"I'd fly to the top of a mountain, yes I would
and cornhole the man in the moon
I have the wings of an angel
and the balls of a big hairy coon"

Here it is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9AxmSn6slc (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9AxmSn6slc)

Wasn't it released on a FTD album ?

It would be nice if they did this for the Beatles, but one of the great things about that band was that they generally knew when a given take was a winner and released most of their best material on albums/singles at the time.  I know that there are still some missing gems circulating among the faithful, particularly from the White Album/Let It Be phase, but I don't think there's that much essential material left (The Anthology series covered a lot of that stuff, though they made some questionable decisions there...). 

Obviously, bands like the Beach Boys and the Rolling Stones have a lot more great unreleased material, so releasing it online like this makes a lot of sense.  I hope that the Beach Boys run with this concept.

I still want to hear Carnival of Light one of these days. Ooo, and a proper Kinfauns/White Album sessions boxset would be cool, too.