Student to re-release bootleg album on Internet

By Ayall Sagi
Staff Writer

This week a Purdue freshman will again put The Dave Matthews Band's unreleased album, "The Lillywhite Sessions," on the Internet free of charge, helping DMB fans all over the world hear Matthew's bootleg masterpiece.

Jason Tang, a freshman in the Schools of Engineering, is offering the world "The Lillywhite Session" at http://dmb.jktang.com.

It all started in March when Craig Knapp, the lead singer of Ants Marching, a DMB tribute band from New York, received a package from a fan he had been e-mailing.

The package was what fans have been calling "The Lillywhite Sessions," or the studio recordings the band did with Steve Lillywhite in Charlottesville, Va., which they scrapped in favor of the band's newest release, "Everyday."

After getting permission from producer Steve Lillywhite, and realizing that there was no copyright infringement with the distribution of the album, Knapp was ready to take the band's open recording and trading philosophy and release the album to the world.

But Knapp's Internet connection was too slow.

On March 24, the album got into Tang's hands and like most fans, he loved the album. But there were problems with the songs because of Knapp's poor encoding. So Tang turned to friend Paul Romer, a junior in the School of Technology, who was an audio technology major at Indiana University, and asked him to digitally remaster the songs.

"People liked the songs, but complained that the songs weren't on the right level or the vocals were not loud enough," Romer said.

Tang made the Web page late Sunday, and by Monday, he had received more than 5,000 unique hits.

Tang's success did not stop over night; on Tuesday he got another 7,000 hits, and was at 40,000 as of Saturday night.

Tang got a lot of recognition from the Dave Matthews Band community for his effort, and on Mar. 26, got a pleasant surprise from www.nancies.org, voted the No.1 band fan site by VH1.

"They put up a link to my site, my name and my University affiliation on their site," said Tang.

Due to the popularity of the album and the publicity of www.nancies.org, Tang says, "The Purdue bandwidth was being taken up by all the downloads and PUCC shut the site down Monday afternoon." Tang's site was still getting a massive amount of hits, but people couldn't download anymore.

Scott Ksander, associate director of Purdue's computing center, said PUCC shut down Tang's Web site because the amount of bandwidth the site was using was endangering the rest of Purdue's network users.

"We do this rarely," he said. "We try not to do this. I mean, shutting down people is a pretty antisocial thing to do. And the reason we cut him off was not that he got so many hits, it was about the stability of the system."

To remedy the situation, Tang moved the site to a friend's account, but it got shut down last Wednesday at 1 p.m.

The new site, before being shut down, received about 13,000 hits. "Since then, I moved the site back without any MP3s, and put up a message that they are unavailable for download at this time," Tang said.

This caused another problem for Tang. "On Friday, about 11:30, I got a call from the secretary of the Dean of Students who basically told me that they know I have the site and have been moving it to a friend's account and also told me that I was given an oral warning not to do it again."

Tang has been working with Romer, and by sometime this week, they hope to get the Web site back up. To not cause any future problems with PUCC, they have limited the number of people on Romer's server to 10 at a time, and these few may only download at a certain bandwidth. Ksander said those precautions should fix the problem.

Tang and Romer have a generous philosophy on distributing the album. "I don’t want to sell it because it is morally wrong and legally wrong," he said.

Romer said, "It is one thing to distribute the music if the band doesn't care, but another if to make money off of it if you didn't put in any work."

Tang put up a message on his site, asking people who download the album to donate money to the Bama Works Charity, a foundation established by The Dave Matthews Band committed to charitable works.

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