Here’s another post from our all-the-more regular contributor, Richard Thompson. He writes from England, where he is also a longstanding contributor to British Bluegrass News, a quarterly print publication where he also briefly served as editor.

The four-piece progressive bluegrass/jam band from Colorado, Yonder Mountain String Band, has announced their first ever live pay-per-view Webcast from the Pageant Theatre, St Louis, to take place on Saturday, February 24 at 8.00pm.

The band consists of Dave Johnson, banjo and vocals; Jeff Austin, mandolin and vocals; Ben Kaufmann, bass and vocals; and Adam Aijala, guitar and vocals, and has been building a fine reputation in their field ever since their formation in December 1988. Their discography is remarkable for the number of ‘live’ recordings that are among the studio sets that they have released. The live albums, all in the “Mountain Tracks” series, now numbers four volumes, the latest of which was released in February last year. All, along with most of the band’s studio albums, can be found on their own Frog Pad Records label. Producers of the Yonder Mountain String Band albums include Sally Van Meter and Tim O’Brien.

Typical of jam bands the Yonder Mountain String Band allow, even encourage, audience members to record and share recordings of their live performances.

To take advantage of this exciting new visual and audio opportunity visit the band’s website where you can register and pre-order the show using the Beta iClips Network facility. Unfortunately, the webcast is not compatible with Macs. It can only run on a computer where Windows is the sole, native OS. Not even an Intel Mac runinng Windows (via Boot Camp or Parallels Desktop) will be able to view this webcast.

The Yonder Mountain String Band website has details of their tour dates for the coming months also.

If you like music videos you’re probably disappointed by the lack of bluegrass music videos on the music channels coming in over cable and satellite. Enter Ya’ll Wire. This is a fairly new site that is still under development and assembling content, but it is live.

The site features music videos for the bluegrass, country, and Christian genres. It’s advertiser driven with text ads as well as short video ads that play before/between videos. The ads are not bothersome in the least and I saw at least one of them that was entertaining in its own right.

It’s a great idea, but there really isn’t that much content in the way of bluegrass videos yet.

• Alison Krauss & Union Station - 2 videos
• Yonder Mountain String Band - 2 videos
• Ryan Shupe and The Rubber Band - 2 videos
• Chris Thile
• Sam Bush
• Rhonda Vincent
• The Grascals
• The Gibson Brothers
• Adrienne Young
• Old Crowe Medicine Show
• Lori Willcuts

That’s a total of fourteen at this time, but the site is still seeking contributions from content providers. They do have a contact form for submitting videos. You can’t actually upload anything as they do have to review your request for submission and approve copyrights. I spoke with Ruby Sioux, one of the site’s principles, and we discussed the issue of copyrights.

We pay the publishing societies BMI, SEASC, and are working on an agreement with ASCAP.

We do not allow anyone to post videos to the site without our review. We do not want people to post copyrighted material, unless the copyright holders approve.

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