Google’s YouTube just nabbed a Mother lode of concert footage after striking an agreement with Music Vault. The world’s most popular video service sees the addition of more than 12,000 new clips to Music Vault’s own channel, which the concert footage archive created back in April with an initial 1,600 videos. Combined with the channel’s existing video, the new footage – which features a vast variety of artists and live performances – brings the YouTube channel’s total amount of exclusive content to more than 2,000 hours, according to a report from The Verge.
The famed bands and performers showcased in the collection include rock and pop acts such as The Who, The Rolling Stones, Lou Reed, The Band, and Peter Frampton. But the catalogue also has performances from ’90s-era acts and even newer artists such as The Black Angels, The Dodos, Deer Tick, and The Mountain Goats, courtesy of film holdings from modern sites such as Paste Magazine and Daytrotter.
Music Vault’s YouTube channel has a handful of sub-channels for some of the bigger bands and songwriters that comprise a large proportion of the content: The Grateful Dead, The Allman Brothers, Neil Young, Santana, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, and Van Morrison, as well as individual genre channels for Blues and Jazz. But if you want to really delve into the resource’s material and break it all down by artist, head over to Music Vault’s official website. The official site has a “Browse” tab for categories such as “Best Live Performances,” “Most Viewed,” and “Featured Releases,” but the “Performers” tab is where you can really go nuts. The section has hundreds of artists broken down from A to Z, and includes some real gems ripe for the picking, from a cluster of “Best of Newport Jazz Festival” compilations for each year from 1985 to 2008, to 1985’s “Bill Graham Presents 20th Anniversary Concert.”
This incredibly versatile source for art from both a bygone era and our own modern musical epoch is owned and managed by Wolfgang’s Vault, which acquired a large proportion of its catalogue in 2003 from the archives of Bill Graham Presents. The acquisition included rare and previously unreleased recordings from legendary venues like the Fillmore East and Winterland. Wolfgang’s Vault maintains its video content within its subsidiary service, Concert Vault.
