Live records are often debated and evaluated according to two ways of experiencing music: (1) the experience of the live performance (i.e., the concert), and (2) the experience of listening to the performer’s studio recordings. Both of these perspectives reflect an aesthetic ideology of liveness that emerged in the United States beginning in the late 1920s. Developed as part of an ad campaign by the American Federation of Musicians, the ideology of liveness sought to elevate the experience of music made in the presence of “living musicians” over that of recorded, or “canned,” music and was motivated by the economic and professional uncertainties that accompanied the rise of recorded sound and the introduction of synchronized sound in theaters. The emergence of the live record as a marketable commodity beginning in the 1950s further served to reassert the primacy of live performance in the imagination of consumers. By the middle of the 1960s, live albums enabled record companies to profit on the perceived value and imagined worth of liveness, an idea that was now being packaged and sold to a new generation of record buyers and audiences at the dawn of the rock era.