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LIVE performances have made for some of rock music’s most exalted moments. Some were recorded, but many were simply chattered about until they became legend. The Velvet Underground at Warhol’s Factory parties raised an unknown art-noise band to mythical status. The Ramones at CBGB’s defined the sweet trashiness of ‘70s punk.

Increasingly, music fans can watch live performances on the Internet -- as they are happening, or a few hours or days later.

At a grass-roots level, tech-savvy kids slap up cellphone videos of the Trail of the Dead’s onstage meltdowns on You Tube.com or upload MP3s from the Midlake show onto their cleverly named blogs. But there’s also a concerted effort by powerful Web entities and local clubs to bring the live experience straight to home computers and portable communication devices.

By far the biggest Web presence to get involved is My Space.com, which presented its first live webcast last November. Strategic marketing director Ted Dhanik selected Interference, a live club night featuring DJs Sandra Collins, Paul Oakenfold and VJ Vello Virkhaus, to capitalize on electronica’s devoted fan base.

“We wanted to pilot the program with a smaller genre of music before we went to something bigger, like hip-hop or rock,” Dhanik says. “It also matched MySpace’s reputation of being edgy and revolutionary.... The event was a total success and surpassed all our expectations.”

Since then, MySpace has webcast concerts from My Chemical Romance, the Roots and Clipse, but unlike Interference, which played in real time, those shows have aired after a couple of weeks of editing.

“We feel like it has more of an impact to wait and release the concert as an edited package,” Dhanik says. “We’re still going to have live broadcasts once a quarter or so, but there’s not enough urgency to have it all the time.”

Burbank-based Rehearsals .com, a division of CenterStaging Corp., provides high-definition streaming video of musicians at practice. Rehearsals.com utilizes its parent company’s formidable resources -- a 150,000-square-foot facility with 11 studios and a high-definition broadcast center -- to record a wide variety of musicians, including pop stars Norah Jones and Burt Bacharach and indie band Aviatic, performing and often retooling their songs.

According to Tommy Nast, executive vice president of CenterStaging, Rehearsals.com was conceived to capture the “the quiet, magical moments that usually happen when an artist is practicing alone.” Instead of cameramen zooming in on a performer, Studio 11, where Jones was filmed, was equipped with 10 robotically controlled cameras.

“In 10 minutes, the performers forget where they are,” Nast says. “It allows them to focus on the music.”

THE Gig, a cavernous club on Melrose, eschews the quieter moments in favor of conveying the full-throttle passion of a live show from its roster of mostly unsigned bands. For the last eight months or so, owner Peter O’Fallon has been recording five or six a week in the hopes of capturing “a Beatles in Hamburg or another U2.” The club’s website, liveatthegig.com, has audio and video archives of about 600 acts; all of the footage begins with the Gig’s black velvet curtain rising onstage.

As director of cult favorites “Northern Exposure” and the feature film “Suicide Kings,” O’Fallon saw the Gig’s website as not only a way for many unsigned acts to promote their music to fans and potential labels, but also as a place where Hollywood music editors could shop for new talent.

“There’s a lot of demand for unsigned acts on TV,” O’Fallon says, “which is a terrific way for a band to break.” Absinthe Academy, a local glam-rock outfit, will appear on the upcoming FX series “The Riches,” with Minnie Driver and Eddie Izzard, based on its Gig performances.

For Silver Lake’s indie rock haven Spaceland, recording bands is important for posterity but also as a way to catapult up-and-comers to the next level. Last summer, promoter Mitchell Frank recruited Kamran V. from Universal’s New Media division to launch Spaceland Recordings, a label specializing in multitrack audio recordings of Spaceland regulars such as Thunderbirds Are Now!, Irving and Darker My Love. The albums are then distributed to Internet retailers iTunes and Napster, as well as brick-and-mortar stores Amoeba, Sea Level and their equivalents across the U.S.

“We’re hoping to help the bands grow beyond the club,” Kamran V. says. “The live records are capturing all of these unique, memorable, coming-of-age moments for the bands.... What if we had that kind of recording for Beck?”

For the indie psych-pop band Irving, the Internet has been paramount for gaining fans and selling its latest LP, “Death in the Garden, Blood on the Flowers.” Irving has also given interviews or performances on Hd.net and KCRW.com. The Web as marketing tool excites the band, but it also poses artistic problems. “I hear at my own concerts how somebody’s not going to buy the album because they’ve already downloaded most of it or gotten it from a friend,” keyboardist Aaron Burrows says. “We’re a band that likes to make albums, yet that’s not the way the work will necessarily be received. Do we start making just singles?”

WIRED magazine Editor in Chief Chris Anderson, author of the bestselling “The Long Tail” about the increasing nichification of the entertainment markets, thinks bands and fans are being fantastically well-served by the Internet.

“There’s never been a better time to be a band,” Anderson says. “The Internet is a distribution channel available to everyone. It allows for a direct connection between artists and fans. Increasingly, the labels are playing a distant role.”

But Anderson, who waves away any notions that the Internet has compromised artistic expression, thinks that the live act is better experienced in person. “If I want to see a live performance, I’m going to a club,” he says. “The Internet is no substitute. I think the live performance is the strongest asset of the music industry.”

margaret.wappler@latimes.com

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Club Web

Never mind valet parking, overpriced drinks and ringing ears. Just power up the computer and watch a show:

YouTube.com

The ultimate in grass-roots webcasting. Search for your favorite band and chances are there’s live footage.

MySpace.com/thelist

The List’s archive includes shows from My Chemical Romance, Taking Back Sunday, NoFX, Ludacris, Pharell and the Roots.

Rehearsals.com

A range of artists from indie to superstar give intimate performances recorded in super-plush digs.

Liveatthegig.com

Kids from Germany, Japan and Australia visit the Gig’s archive to watch mostly unsigned bands play their hearts out in Hollywood.

KCRW.com/music

Every blogged-about act (Silversun Pickups, Lily Allen, Los Abandoned) stops by this Santa Monica-based radio station to jam on Nic Harcourt’s show “Morning Becomes Eclectic.”

Groupietunes.com/truemusic

“True Music w/ Katie Daryl,” the long-running HDNet music series, features interviews conducted by the ever-bubbly Daryl and performances from Incubus, Beastie Boys, Ted Nugent, Maroon 5, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Lisa Loeb and many others.

Musicplustv.com

Interviews and live performances with performers such as Dilated Peoples and Lady Sovereign. A recent Black Lips hour featured the gutter-

punk band answering instant messages from fans, playing their favorite videos and, well, belching into the microphone.

Stickam.com

This social networking site revolving around video conferencing allows bands such as Mudvayne to netcast shows and interact with fans in real time. Warning: Musicians don’t always make the best documentarians (i.e., Story Told’s plumbing video), but the relationship Stickam fosters between bands and fans is tight.

Secondlife.com

It’s the Sims with guitars. On this online virtual world, such disparate acts as Suzanne Vega, Regina Spektor, Duran Duran and Chamillionaire have either performed or hosted parties via colorful avatars.