This seems to be an emerging trend: bands selling recordings of concerts on USB sticks as you leave the venue. The Barenaked Ladies are reportedly selling their concerts without DRM on USB sticks, along with albums in the same format. Metallica have been doing this since 2003 and they actually take the time to mix it and make it sound good. The only drawback is sometimes it takes a couple of days to a week to finish it up.

http://www.last100.com/2007/08/13/live-con...-on-usb-sticks/

One issue is production costs. It is fairly costly to produce audio and video for an event like this, and to have the sticks ready for people to buy within like 10 minutes, or however long it takes for the applause to die down. But some people think this is financially doable. If someone was doing a serious bulk buy of 32 meg sticks, they could probably get them for 5 or 6 bucks a piece, sell the thing for 15 dollars and they are making some serious money.

I can imagine a super-powerful UNIX server with lots of RAM and 4 CPUs cranking away at a big video file, copying it to a ... USB stick farm.

Yes people are doing this a lot these days.I saw an advrt in a British newspaper that was for the latest Bourne Identity movie, they were giving a voucher for a 512 mb stick free to everyone.The stick had lots of trailers games etc for the new film.
My guess is like those new cruiser drives had some kind of "hidden" partition on them so you could never delete the content but were free to use say the 250mb that was left over.Unless you use some kind of removal tool no matter what the content will always be there after a normal format of the stick.
I think its a really marketing exercise, who would turn down a free memory stick? I know I wouldnt;)

Well, that will surely get people to join the concert. If not for the music, then for the flash drive. Somehow, it sounds so wrong...

Well now... I guess concerts have come a long way from giving out T-shirts! Ok, did I just like, show my age there or something!? But that is a sweet idea, nowadays... And as for like wiping out the existing content... why bother, when you can go to Target and buy 1Gig stick for like under 20.

I was cleaning out around my PC desk and saw tons of my 5.5 disks... I was wondering what I could really do with them now!? Let my toddler play with them!? You can use the disks to balance the table... get rid of the dictionaries under the table!

But I got off topic again, of course! But that is pretty sweet! Everything portable will work well with flashdrive transport... Most of the time people have the equip with them.... So they can enjoy the music experience while they are there, and then on the way home!

Gotta love evolving... and the next question is... what will be next!? That and I feel like hitting up a concert sometime, soon...

Rock on, people!
- bob -

The amazing part about this is getting the stuff ready in such a short period of time, you can imagine that as technology goes on you'd eventually need to get new media to transfer files. Flash drives are pretty much what everyone is using now for any size of data.

This stuff could probably be possible if they have something like a streaming video camera that streams straight into the server like computer, which rebuilds the movie on the fly and by the time it's finished - copying to loads of usb drives has already gone halfway.
The only thing i see here is that the usb speeds might bottleneck the process a bit but it really depends what hardware is running on the system.

-HellFire