SOME NOTES ON BOOTLEGS and UNOFFICIAL RECORDINGS

The world of bootlegs is changing drastically, and the combination of the Internet and home CD burners is slowly killing off commercial CD companies. Some of the bigger groups, like KTS (Italy, possibly closed), Barking Pig (California?), Flat (allegedly Australia) and Laughing Cow (Georgia), don't invest nearly as much as they used to, since fans are either burning shows for each other for free or forming even smaller companies to distribute discs either at cost or at a very low cost.

The downshifting of commercial interests has lots of benefits for fans of "small-market" acts like Roxy Music. Naturally, nobody would start a bootleg label unless they loved the music, since the risks were high and the profits uncertain. Nevertheless, in the 1990s, a bootleg label would have to press many hundreds, if not a thousand or more copies of a CD in order to get a decent per-unit price. This almost guaranteed that the acts most commonly bootlegged were ones with much larger fan bases: Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan and the like. Lacking any first-hand contact with any of the leggers in question (but having reams of recent Net and print research), it seems like a company would have to "get into" Zeppelin or U2 or Tori Amos (possibly the most bootlegged 90s artist) in order to realize the owner's personal desire to put out Joe Cocker or Oasis or Roxy material.

By the end of the 1990s, this began a very speedy turnaround. Only the ignorant or the RIAA could possibly accuse bootleggers of greedy profiteering, but bootleg CDs cost a lot for a reason: the darn things had to be pressed and printed either overseas or in underground factories, and the distribution network wasn't quite as efficient as a major label's. However, faced with the choice of a $22 commercial boot or an $8 pirate of the same disc from Firefly, most would buy the cheaper boot. Allegedly the brainchild of a quintet of Duke University students, Firefly was among the first of the much smaller companies who did everything "in-house" with a CD-R burner, a color printer and a bunch of other peoples' Roxy Music, XTC and Squeeze concerts. A catalog like that would be useless for large-scale commercial bootleggers. (Their handful of Roxy titles are the only reason I single out or know of Firefly, one of easily hundreds operating in the US.)

Commercial bootleggers are also finding it harder to sell their wares, since record stores see the market for $22-25 single CDs drying and are moving away from them. In the early 1990s, before bootleg CDs first appeared, Atlanta's Fantasyland Records was possibly the southeast's finest source for vinyl boots. Famously, they featured beautiful bootleg boxed sets from Paul McCartney's 1989-90 world tour that easily surpassed the packaging of the later, official Tripping the Live Fantastic album. Nowadays, tumbleweeds metaphorically roll over the teeny number of bootleg CDs in the shop. Fantasyland's run by smart people, though. They know the Limp Bizkit show they bought for $17.50 is unlikely to sell for $25 when the same show's being burned in the suburbs and moving for $5. They may purchase your $5 Limp Bizkit disc and hope to move it for $10, but they'll cop an attitude about it.

The new practice of re-burning is also changing the way fans look at music. Since the technology is out there, there's simply no longer a reason to settle for someone else's poor packaging, or stupid name, or incorrect information when a buyer can fix it themselves. Somewhere out there, you'll find a Tori Amos site listing over 150 commercial Tori boots. The maintainer gave up trying to keep up, such is the flood of home-burned CD-Rs. On the other end of the spectrum, there's a Suede site which openly attacks CD-Rs as killing bootlegs! You have to wonder which pie his finger's in.

Once upon a time, there was a whole world separating the bootleggers and the tape traders, since leggers were dealing in vinyl and traders in audio cassettes. Now, both of those media are either dead or dying, and live shows are being passed down on CDs. It seems that almost instantly, from the appearance of CD-R, the former tape traders began attacking the people selling either pressed silver CDs or burned CD-Rs. Alt.music.bootlegs is no longer a safe haven for sellers. Boston's Mellow Recordings was told to cease and desist by the RIAA after the fellow behind it angered the regulars there and on a U2 group. His crime? Selling CD-Rs for $18-20 each.

Personally, I don't have anything resembling a problem with the commercial sale of bootlegs. As for the cost, they are worth what the buyer pays. As for that pathetic "loss-of-royalties" argument, well, if the major label record company wants royalties, then they should release the concert themselves and collect some. Columbia has extensively sold four or more Bob Dylan bootlegs, and it has worked just fine for Pearl Jam. (On that note, should the record company give an official album release of a bootlegged show (or BBC sessions�?), then trading of the bootleg should cease.)

Finally, there is an important etiquette about unofficial releases: if you get in someone's good graces and acquire a bootleg or an unlabeled live CD for free, and your benefactor asks that it not be sold for profit, then you should respect this. Other bootleg albums are clearly labelled as free. I have listed some of them here. Should you ever see one of the CDs listed on this site as being free for sale anywhere, please do not buy it! If you come into possession of one, please don't sell it! These CDs were made by fans, not by underground companies. The fans who have made free CDs have done so with the intent of them remaining free, and it is unethical to profit from something done with the sole intent of sharing music without profit. (Debates on my peculiar notion of bootleg ethics are always welcome.)