One hour after the Pixies left the stage Saturday night at theVoodoo Music Experience, their most recent CD was available forpurchase.
Adam Newhouse, a longtime Pixies fan, heard the band promotingthe live recordings for sale at the end of their set and said hequickly made his way over to the booth peddling the CD near themain stage.
Newhouse was one of many fans who was looking forward to beingable to purchase a CD of the Pixies—a group that has not hada new CD in over a decade.
MunckMix is a Chicago-based company that specializes inrecording live music performances and selling them to fans.
The company travels with bands, as well as live festivals suchas Jazz Fest and the Voodoo Music Experience, where they burn thelive show on CDs and sell them about an hour after the concert iscomplete.
“I think the [live recordings] are really cool,”Newhouse said of MunckMix. “The bands onstage did a good jobof promoting it.”
MunckMix has been at Voodoo for the past two years.
Rik Reppe, the general manager of MunckMix, said the recordingequipment that the company uses sits directly on the sound boardand records from all the mics on stage. This lends to the superiorsound quality of the recordings.
Reppe said the company travels with an RV filled with 25 burnersin order to keep up with customer demand.
Reppe attributes the success of the company to the fact thatthey provide something that fans can not get anywhere else.
Reppe said that their success at Voodoo, or at any kind of musicvenue, is a direct result of what artists they are able to signon.
As the Pixies were performing, Reppe predicted the band’sperformance would be a big seller.
“You can’t get anything recent by [thePixies],” Reppe said. “They’re a band that,myself included, have an awful lot of fans that have been dying forthem to play again, and now we can actually get something. And theyput on such great shows.”
Reppe said many record labels are apprehensive about allowingMunckMix to record artists.
“They view us as in competition with them — wedon’t,” Reppe said.
Reppe said the company views themselves as helpful to recordlabels.
“When [a band] plays a show, people are excited about itand they want to buy what they just heard, let us do that,”Reppe said. “That’s how [they] can start breaking[their] bands.”
Reppe said most of the artists they speak to are enthusiastic,but often their labels are the ones who do not allow therecordings.
Reppe said the threat of illegal downloading is also a factor inwhy labels do not allow MunckMix to record the shows.
“I don’t know how you distribute music anymorewithout taking that risk,” Reppe said. “It’s oneof the objections we hear from labels … but they can do that withthe stuff [the label] releases.”
Reppe said their clients are almost always satisfied with thework they do, and everybody they have ever recorded maintains agood relationship. Almost all the bands or performers they recordcontinue to allow MunckMix to record and sell them again.
“We bend over backwards to balance [our profitability]with the artistic concerns of the band,” Reppe said.
Reppe said written into every contract is the ability of theband to decide if they want the show sold or not.
Reppe said many of the medium- to large-sized labels are slowlycoming around, and he is sure MunckMusic will continue to grow.
“[Sometimes] the labels say no because we were asking themto make an incredibly large decision in a very short period oftime,” Reppe said. “It’s an endurance race.Because we manage our costs really well and because we’ve gotsome lucrative acts that we work with, we’ll be around for awhile trying to wear them down.”