The Return of Phish in Today's Internet Age

Phish returned last night. And in a BIG way. I wasn't there so I'm not going to write too much about the show or the music. If you want that, the best piece I've read so far is at http://www.melophobe.com/concert-reviews/phish-hampton-va-friday-march-6/

You can download the show from http://livephish.com . Which I have done and I've started listening to the first set - which, btw clocked in at an hour and 50 minutes. I currently have goosebumps up and down my arms. I completely agree with what was said in the review link I posted - the Phish community will be talking about this first set for a very, very long time.

But last night I stayed up to date on what was happening by logging onto the web. Twitter, in particular, and fairly obviously, was THE place to get the scoop without actually being there. In addition to knowing what was being played, you could see cell phone images by searching http://search.twitter.com/search?q=phish+twitpic

Even the band had someone adding images to Flickr while the show was happening:

YouTube videos were making up during the show. Pretty short and pretty crummy quality, but still...if you're not there you just soak this stuff up.

Here's one that probably didn't make it to YouTube until after, but its better quality and worth providing a link to

(OK, there's some other videos at http://festivalcrashers.blogspot.com/)

It was even possible to start downloading a .torrent file of the first set before the second set even finished!

Quite honestly, an overly dramatic thought that ran into my mind as I was browsing the Twitter traffic last night was, "How the hell did we ever have Phish shows withouth all this stuff?" Remember how your friends would call you at setbreak and give you the list on the first set? Those days are over.

Phish shows now have a home version that allows you to play along.