Bootleg recording


A bootleg recording is an audio or video recording of a performance not officially released by the artist or any other legal authority. Making and distributing such recordings is known as bootlegging. Recordings may be copied and traded among fans without financial exchange, but some bootleggers have sold recordings for profit, sometimes by adding professional-quality sound engineering and packaging to the raw material. Bootlegs usually consist of unreleased studio recordings, live performances or interviews without the quality control of official releases.
Bootlegs reached new popularity with Bob Dylan's Great White Wonder, a compilation of studio outtakes and demos released in 1969 using low-priority pressing plants. The following year, the Rolling Stones' Live'r Than You'll Ever Be, an audience recording of a late 1969 show, received a positive review in Rolling Stone. Subsequent bootlegs became more sophisticated in packaging, particularly the Trademark of Quality label with William Stout's cover artwork. Compact disc bootlegs first appeared in the 1980s, and Internet distribution became increasingly popular in the 1990s.
Changing technologies have affected the recording, distribution, and profitability of the bootlegging industry. The copyrights for the music and the right to authorise recordings often reside with the artist, according to several international copyright treaties. The recording, trading and sale of bootlegs continues to thrive, even as artists and record companies release official alternatives.

Definitions

The word bootleg originates from the practice of smuggling illicit items in the legs of tall boots, particularly the smuggling of alcohol during the American Prohibition era. The word, over time, has come to refer to any illegal or illicit product. This term has become an umbrella term for illicit, unofficial, or unlicensed recordings, including vinyl LPs, silver CDs, or any other commercially sold media or material. The alternate term ROIO or VOIO arose among Pink Floyd collectors, to clarify that the recording source and copyright status were hard to determine.
Although unofficial and unlicensed recordings had existed before the 1960s, the first rock bootlegs that were offered for sale came in plain sleeves with the titles rubber stamped on them. However, they quickly developed into more sophisticated packaging, in order to distinguish one bootleg manufacturer from inferior competitors. Later developments in packaging and desktop publishing have made it possible for almost anyone to create "official" looking CDs. With the advent of the cassette and CD-R, however, some bootlegs are traded privately with no attempt at professional quality. This is even more evident with the ability to share bootlegs via the Internet.
Bootlegs should not be confused with counterfeit or unlicensed recordings, which are merely unauthorised duplicates of officially released recordings, often attempting to resemble the official product as closely as possible. Some record companies have considered any record issued outside of their control, and for which they do not receive payment, to be a counterfeit, which includes bootlegs. However, some bootleggers are keen to stress that the market for bootleg recordings is different from the one for counterfeit recordings, and claim that a typical consumer for a bootleg will have bought most or all of that artist's official releases anyway.
File:Who's Zoo.jpg|thumb|right|250px|Who's Zoo compiled early singles and B-sides by the Who, which had not been commercially released in the U.S. Like several Trademark of Quality bootlegs, it featured cover artwork by William Stout.
The most common type is the live bootleg, often an audience recording, which is created with sound recording equipment smuggled into a live concert. Many artists and live venues prohibit this form of recording, but from the 1970s onwards the increased availability of portable technology made such bootlegging easier, and the general quality of these recordings has improved over time as consumer equipment becomes sophisticated. A number of bootlegs originated with FM radio broadcasts of live or previously recorded live performances. Other bootlegs may be soundboard recordings taken directly from a multi-track mixing console used to feed the public address system at a live performance. Artists may record their own shows for private review, but engineers may surreptitiously take a copy of this, which ends up being shared. As a soundboard recording is intended to supplement the natural acoustics of a gig, a bootleg may have an inappropriate mix of instruments, unless the gig is so large that everything needs to be amplified and sent to the desk.
Some bootlegs consist of private or professional studio recordings distributed without the artist's involvement, including demos, works-in-progress or discarded material. These might be made from private recordings not meant to be widely shared, or from master recordings stolen or copied from an artist's home, a recording studio or the offices of a record label, or they may be copied from promotional material issued to music publishers or radio stations, but not for commercial release. A theme of early rock bootlegs was to copy deleted records, such as old singles and B-sides, onto a single LP, as a cheaper alternative to obtaining all the original recordings. Strictly speaking, these were unlicensed recordings, but, because the work required to clear all the copyrights and publishing of every track for an official release was considered to be prohibitively expensive, the bootlegs became popular. Some bootlegs, however, did lead to official releases. The Who's Zoo bootleg, collecting early singles by the Who, inspired the official album Odds And Sods, which beat the bootleggers by issuing unreleased material, while various compilations of mid-1960s bands inspired the Nuggets series of albums.

History

Pre-1960s

According to the enthusiast and author Clinton Heylin, the concept of a bootleg record can be traced back to the days of William Shakespeare, when unofficial transcripts of his plays would be published. At that time, society was not particularly interested in who had authored a work. The "cult of authorship" was established in the 19th century, resulting in the first Berne Convention in 1886 to cover copyright. The US did not agree to the original terms, resulting in many "piratical reprints" of sheet music being published in the US by the end of the century.
Film soundtracks were often bootlegged. If the officially released soundtrack had been re-recorded with a house orchestra, there would be demand for the original audio recording taken directly from the film. One example was a bootleg of Judy Garland performing Annie Get Your Gun, before Betty Hutton replaced her early in production, but after a full soundtrack had been recorded. The Recording Industry Association of America objected to unauthorised releases and attempted several raids on production. The Wagern-Nichols Home Recordist Guild recorded numerous performances at the Metropolitan Opera House, and openly sold them without paying royalties to the writers and performers. The company was sued by the American Broadcasting Company and Columbia Records, who obtained a court injunction against producing the record.
Saxophone player and Charlie Parker fan Dean Benedetti famously bootlegged several hours of solos by Parker at live clubs in 1947 and 1948 via tape and disc recordings. Benedetti stored the recordings and they were only rediscovered in 1988, over thirty years after Benedetti had died, by which time they had become a "jazz myth." Most of these recordings were later released officially on Mosaic Records in the 1990s.

1960s

The first popular rock music bootleg resulted from Bob Dylan's activities between largely disappearing from the public eye after his motorcycle accident in 1966, and the release of John Wesley Harding at the end of 1967. After a number of artists had hits with Dylan songs that he had not officially released himself, demand increased for Dylan's original recordings, particularly when they started airing on local radio in Los Angeles. Through various contacts in the radio industry, a number of pioneering bootleggers managed to buy a reel-to-reel tape containing a selection of unreleased Dylan songs intended for distribution to music publishers and wondered if it would be possible to manufacture them on an LP. They managed to convince a local pressing plant to press between 1,000 and 2,000 copies discreetly, paying in cash and avoiding using real names or addresses. Since the bootleggers could not commercially print a sleeve, due to it attracting too much attention from recording companies, the LP was issued in a plain white cover with Great White Wonder rubber stamped on it. Subsequently, Dylan became one of the most popular artists to be bootlegged with numerous releases.
File:The Rolling Stones - Live'r Than You'll Ever Be original.jpg|thumb|The Rolling Stones' Live'r Than You'll Ever Be, released in late 1969, received a rave review in Rolling Stone
When the Rolling Stones announced their 1969 American tour, their first in the U.S. for several years, an enterprising bootlegger known as "Dub" decided to record some of the shows. He purchased a Sennheiser 805 "shotgun" microphone and a Uher 4000 reel to reel tape recorder specifically for recording the performances, smuggling them into the venues. The resulting bootleg, Live'r Than You'll Ever Be, was released shortly before Christmas 1969, mere weeks after the tour had finished, and in January 1970 received a rave review in Rolling Stone, who described the sound quality as "superb, full of presence, picking up drums, bass, both guitars and the vocals beautifully ... it is the ultimate Rolling Stones album". The bootleg sold several tens of thousands of copies, orders of magnitude more than a typical classical or opera bootleg, and its success resulted in the official release of the live album Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out! later in the year. "Dub" was one of the founders of the Trade Mark of Quality bootleg record label.