Audio Video News

On average, 1 percent of our users are making over 50 purchases per year, and we love them for it; 2 percent are buying between 10 and 50 downloads or CDs, while 7 percent buy between 5 and 10 per year. The rest dabble here and there and then dive deep when their favorite band is on tour.

S&V: Which artists (or shows) are the most popular?
Serling: This completely depends on who’s on tour at any given time. Currently Bruce’s River Tour is the most popular because we’re in the middle of it, but the Pearl Jam tour just started so that will soon creep into the Top 10. When Phish tour starts this summer, they will likely jump to the top. You can always find the Top 10 from the past 30 days on the nugs.net homepage.

S&V: In terms of download format, the standard offering appears to be MP3, FLAC, or CD but high-resolution formats are offered for some recordings. Which format is most popular?
Serling: The general rule since we started selling downloads is a 70/30 split between MP3 and lossless formats. Regardless of genre—which is very interesting to me—one out of three customers will opt for the higher priced lossless version of any given recording sold on nugs.net’s stores.

That’s a real eye-opener, especially when we discuss that with the major labels with regards to their catalogs. Within that 30 percent of lossless sales, we see a breakdown among the higher resolution formats like 24-bit/192 kHz or DSD, which we only offer for certain releases. Typically, when a Hi-Res format is offered, we will see 5 to 10 percent of total sales in that higher quality format. When CDs are offered alongside downloads, it skews the numbers considerably, depending on the artist. For example, we sell a lot of Springsteen and Pearl Jam live CDs compared to Phish or Widespread Panic. Metallica sells more live downloads than CDs, but we sold out immediately when we did a limited run of four concerts from last year on 180g vinyl.

S&V: Can you tell me about pricing?
Serling: Pricing is typically $9.95 for a 3-hour concert in MP3 format. CD-Quality FLAC, or Apple Lossless is usually $12.95, with Hi-Res formats at $17.95 or $19.95, depending on the resolution. When we offer DSD it is either $39.95 or $49.95, depending on whether it’s DSD64 or DSD128. They are huge files (10+ GB per concert). CDs are usually $23 for a three-CD set of a full concert, but Metallica was adamant about pricing it at $19.81 (the year of their first concert) for a two-CD set.

S&V: How many recordings are offered in resolutions of 24-bit/96 KHz (or higher) or DSD? And how do you see that mix changing moving forward?
Serling: Most of the time, the digital console the show is being mixed and recorded on is running at 24-bit/48 kHz to accommodate the number of inputs coming from the stage. While it’s technically possible to run at 96 kHz or even higher, most engineers we work with don’t feel that it’s reliable enough and worth the extra drive space required for archiving the multitrack recordings at the higher resolution. So the short answer is, for current tours we are typically releasing 24/48. For archival projects we’ll put out 24/192 and even DSD or Double-DSD (DSD128) when possible. Some artists, notably Pearl Jam, bring the resolution up to 24/96 in the mastering stage, as the mastering engineer will take the audio back into the analog realm to run it through some outboard gear for sweetening during the mastering process, then sample it back at 24/96 or higher.

We have a thriving pay-per-view business with bands like Phish, where we charge $24.95 per night for a FullHD 1080p live stream of every other show they play.

S&V: What about live streaming?
Serling: We have a thriving pay-per-view business with bands like Phish, where we charge $24.95 per night for a FullHD 1080p live stream of every other show they play. The audio is 320kbps AAC, since that’s a limitation of the codecs we’re using. But we’re working on a way to do lossless audio or even 24-bit lossless with FullHD video.

Our biggest live event was Metallica the night before Super Bowl 50, where we had over a million views of the free stream from AT&T Park here in San Francisco.

Widespread Panic has been offering free audio simulcasts every night they play on LiveWidespreadPanic.com for over two years now. It’s become very popular among fans, and we hope to do that with more of our artists. We will be offering some of these free live streams via the nugs.net app.

S&V: Is there anything else you’d like to add?
Serling: The whole concept behind nugs.net is totally self-serving. As they say, necessity is the mother of invention. I wanted a way to get recordings of every concert I was attending, and I was tired of lugging my gear into the show each night and then waiting for days to trade tapes with others who taped the shows I couldn’t attend. It was always a labor of love.

This still holds true today: I designed the nugs.net app specifically so I’d have an easier way to listen to last night’s shows (we typically have 10 on any given night). I was tired of downloading them and wanted to have ubiquitous on-demand access. Similarly, our next update to nugster (the Mac and PC desktop app for downloading music from our stores) will incorporate native high-resolution audio playback. We partnered with Sonic Studio to incorporate their playback engine into our download manager. We went through the time and expense to do this because my partner Jon [Richter] and I have spent our lives piecing together great playback systems for our living rooms and we were frustrated that there was no easy way to download and playback all the great sounding Hi-Res Audio we’re now selling. So we built it ourselves.