I’m listening to a Hall & Oates concert from 1982.

How is this possible? I was only four years old in 1982!

The Concert Vault owns the rights to hundreds of live concert recordings and they’re in the process of putting them all online. There’s a ton up already and they’re adding five concerts a week.

It it legal? Actually, yes! They purchased the recordings from the concert promoter who made them and they’re paying license fees to ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC. Sooo…yes? It’s almost too good to be true.

Right now you can only listen through a streamed Flash interface, but they’re promising direct downloads later in the year and full concert video streaming shortly thereafter.

For more concert recordings you can also check out the Internet Archive’s Live Music Archive, an absolutely mammoth collection of lossless audio captured at concerts of bands with taping-friendly policies. The LMA recordings are mostly bands you’ve never heard of, though.

Pretty neat!