Bootlegging: Creating the Strongest Musical Bonds

For me growing up in the age of the Internet it is hard to imagine a world without it. When I need to find an answer to a question, find out exactly why my back hurts, read the most current news, or listen to music the Internet is always there never letting me down. Now it is clear that the Internet has completely changed all we know about the recording industry in just about every aspect, but one aspect that may probably go unseen is the bootlegging industry. What many may not know is the intensity of bootleg traders, their sheer dedication and love for doing it. Bootlegging has been around far before the Internet came around as most of you know quite well but the Internet has changed it the most amazing ways.

To say the bootlegging community is a tight knit one would be an understatement, but what created this extreme bond between bootleggers must be associated to the Internet. The bootlegging industry was once an industry mostly used for profit, whether you were going to your low level record store or buying them from some guy in the streets bootlegs were there but of course with a price. Now the times have changed, making people pay for bootlegs is now unacceptable.

When I first discovered the bootlegging community I immediately wanted to join but right from the bat I made a few terrible mistakes. Traders have very strict rules, they want the quality of the show to be exactly as the recording so they do not want you to convert it into lossy formats which degrade the sound like MP3's and they also prohibit paying for bootlegs because what is trading if you have to pay? The first mistake I had was getting my hand on that very first bootleg, in the bootlegging community it is not all that difficult to get your "first" bootleg, in fact all you have to do is just ask someone apart of that online community to make a copy of one for you, all you have to do is just send out an envelope and postage and there you have it. What I did to get my first one which was a Pink Floyd show from 1974 was I actually gave someone my self titled Dylan album. Now becoming more of a veteran in bootleg trading I have come to realize that doing that was wrong, in fact what I did was lost a perfectly good album I purchased with my hard earned money and some what corrupted trading. The second mistake I made was when I actually learned how to download bootlegs I converted them to MP3's (So I could listen to them on my MP3 player) and then traded them in MP3 format. To put into perspective why converting them to lossy media is wrong is think about it in terms of a family recipe for cooking, if one person changes a few of the ingredients and passes that down the quality will be different, but yet that newly revised recipe will forever be handed down and the original will be lost forever.

What makes bootlegging even more interesting is an artists view of it. It seems like the majority of artists embrace it with open arms seeing it as a positive. Bands like U2, The Grateful Dead, and The Mars Volta actually encourage the recording of their shows and why shouldn't they? Being discontent with the illegal downloading of recorded material is understandable in absolutely every right but what we have here is a recording of an unreleased entity. By creating a large and hassle free bootlegging collection of your shows you are in return creating a larger and more intense following for that very reason of bootlegging. To me bootlegging is a wonderful thing, I myself have never actually bootlegged a show but have been involved with many trades with people from all over the world, I never though I would receive mail from people in Europe! My collection of bootlegs has far surpassed 100 and I would love for that to keep growing, once the bootlegging bug bites you can't run away!