Last week, YouTube announced a partnership with Music Vault that brought thousands of remastered, high-quality live performances to the platform. More than 13,000 of these concert clips, to be exact, spanning every rock legend of the last 50 years all the way to modern indie favorites (and even a baffling amount of Limp Bizkit.) No longer will late-night YouTube rabbit-holes be relegated to lo-fi bootlegs or shaky cell phone footage, huzzah! The partnership marks an initial step in YouTube’s increased interest in the music space.
Separate from their YouTube channel, Music Vault houses these videos on their site, which has some pretty handy search tools. The free service is operated by Wolfgang’s Vault, a company that started with the bootlegging site of the same name and is now the owner of Daytrotter and Paste Magazine, amongst other properties. Many of the clips are astonishingly rich in their video and sound quality, particularly when one considers how aged they are and how accustomed we’ve become to fuzzy fan-shot footage.
Frankly, it’s an overwhelming amount of content that music fans won’t know where to start with unless they were searching with a band or specific concert date in mind (there are also themed YouTube playlists). So we asked Bill Antonucci, Music Vault’s curatorial mastermind and content editor, to show us around with a few of his favorite videos through the ages, from Neil Young and Talking Heads to Wilco and Fleet Foxes. Click through for his picks.
