Bootlegs: Technology Making it Easier to Record and Distribute

Bootleg recordings of live shows used to be of very poor quality and had to be distributed manually. No more:

The day after Tori Amos shocked fans in England with a piano rendition of the Eagles’ “Desperado,” MP3s of her performance showed up in Nashville, Tennessee, where David Mobley downloaded one from alt.binaries.tori-amos. “The Tori community is loosely organized,” says the 25-year-old cable TV employee, “but it gets shows to people quickly.”

Fans have traded live bootlegs for decades (“Got that ‘Dark Star’ from Cleveland ’73?”). But the tech – gadgets like laptop recorders, portable DAT players, and pen-sized microphones, as well as distribution methods like SHNapster and FTP servers – keeps getting better. With the upgrades, trading communities have spread well beyond the Deadheads. It’s easy to find concerts by Beck, Oasis, and Radiohead. “It becomes, ‘How much time do I have in the day to burn it?'” says John Bartol, a 35-year-old IT consultant from Alexandria, Virginia, who has been taping and trading concerts since 1984. “There’s always more to grab.”

Among the booters’ most inventive tactics: using wireless radio receivers that capture signals sent to the in-ear monitors musicians wear to hear one another onstage. Fans can record a pristine feed of the entire show from outside the venue [Wired]

Pearl Jam is selling “authorized bootlegs” of their shows. Phish allows recording and trading of their shows for noncommercial purposes.