This Man Has a Killer Music Collection

Bill Sagan has a killer music collection.

Here at Noisecreep, we've become huge fans of ConcertVault.com, a site featuring thousands of high quality concert recordings, it's easy to get lost for hours checking out rare shows and one-of-a-kind performances that Sagan founded in the early '00s.

ConcertVault.com also offers killer classic rock merch, some of the best rock 'n' roll photography you'll ever lay eyes on, and a ton of useful information that helps bring it all to life. Whether you're into vintage Black Sabbath, Sex Pistols, Van Halen, KISS or other, lesser-known greats, there's enough fantastic content to keep you busy for years. If that weren't enough, they also have a more indie rock focused site called Daytrotter.com with fantastic, original live sessions and more.

Noisecreep recently had a chance to learn more about the site and all of the other things that Sagan and his team have been pulling together over the years for fans like us. Again, one simple warning: Once you visit this site, friends and family may not see you for a while. Consider yourself warned.

Bill, how did you come to acquire the archives that comprise ConcertVault.com?

It all started back in 2002 when we acquired the Bill Graham Archives from Clear Channel. This was a pretty remarkable thing for us. When you consider the rich legacy of Mr. Graham and all that he promoted, it's no wonder that the four sets of archives included in what we acquired included upwards 30 million separate elements broken down into four basic categories. The first bucket, as we call it, included vintage merchandise from all of the shows that he promoted including posters t-shirts postcards and more. The second bucket was the photography archive which included approximately 2.2 million shots from the mid-1960s up until 2002. The third bucket included over 10,000 original multitrack live recordings. And then finally the fourth bucket, included over 5600 concert videos that had been shot.

It's hard to even fathom how much content you're talking about here.

It gets better. When we acquired all of those things in 2002 we then set up an operation to try and fill in the holes of those archives, acquiring other companies that complemented everything included in the Bill Graham Archives. So for instance there were other poster companies, audio recording companies like King Biscuit and Silver Eagle, the Record Plant archive, the Ash Grove archive – all of a sudden we realized we were amassing an incredibly historic amount of material that addressed everyone's taste from folk to jazz to rock 'n' roll to punk to metal – everything you could imagine.

Bill, how do you begin to make sense of all this material for visitors to your websites?

We have a team of a very fine editors that help explain and make sense of the content. They act as curators of all our material, explaining its context, steering you toward things you might be interested in experiencing, and in general making sure you have a good time when you visit our site. For a music lover, that's what it's all about.

kWidget.embed({ "targetId": "kaltura_player_1359047996", "cache_st": 1359047996, "wid": "_269692", "uiconf_id": "11645781", "flashvars": { "streamerType": "rtmp" }, "entry_id": "1_l9cyph85" });

Talk a little bit about Daytrotter.com. For all of the vintage archives that you offer, date trotters interesting because it deals with performances being recorded today.

We think Daytrotter is remarkable. With Daytrotter, in studios all across United States, each week we record live band sessions with about 40 to 50 different cutting edge, up and coming bands. These performances are available for download or incredibly, as live streams as they occur. What's remarkable is you get some really strong up and comers in some cases being recorded live in a quality setting the very first time. Were confident that this particular archive is going to grow into something very special very soon as bands catch on and we are very excited about this.

How does ConcertVault.com work exactly? What do people get with the membership?

The model for ConcertVault is the same that we use for Daytrotter or Paste Magazine, which was recently another one of our acquisitions. Generally speaking, we try to get people to come in for a free trial between 7 to 14 days and then after that we ask people to buy a membership. ConcertVault.com memberships are just $2.99 per month or there is an annual membership of just 29.99. This allows you to listen to anything in our vault and you can choose from literally thousands of high quality recorded concerts. You can even download concerts that you like for just five dollars a piece. And at Daytrotter, that same fee allows you to not just listen but download whatever you like as well.

We've been going through these sites up and down and can vouch right here that for those kinds of membership fees, this is way beyond bang for your buck. This is like an all you can eat buffet for music freaks.

Our company's approach is that we have to own all of the copyrights of everything we acquire. That allows us to control costs, we don't have to pay anyone for the music, and thus we can present everything at what we consider to be an incredible value. That's what so much fun about this for us. Making things available that perhaps take you back to a concert you were at, allowing you to explore the evolution of a favorite artist, or making it possible to learn about new artists and genres in a fun and entertaining way - we never stop thinking of how to enhance the different experiences.

Head over to ConcertVault.com for a free trial membership today!