Online Bootlegging: The Musical Underworld

It started around two, maybe three years ago now; an impressionable lamb strolling through the vast field which is music, I learnt I was just in the pen for the slaughterhouse. Not that I had realised at the time, though – it took a pile of Sex Pistols bootlegs (from back when the pistols weren’t six feet under or promoting butter) landing on my desk to dredge myself out and see the wider vista. There’s whole community out there devoted to the recording, listening and trading of recordings from their (and most likely therefore your) favorite artists, a world which was restricted to the elite in the analogue era, but, much like photography, has opened to the masses through the digital revolution.

A brief history: it’s the late 60s, and two bootleggers known only as “Ken” and “Dub” start distributing a double LP of Bob Dylan bootlegs under the title Great White Wonder, aptly named after the packaging, which was simply white with the text “GF 001/2/3/4″ – Dub later reflected on what he had unleashed: “[Great White Wonder] was just this phenomenon. All of a sudden we just started having fistfuls of money. We didn’t realize what we had gotten into”. While the record labels were left fuming, fans suddenly found themselves with access to songs from their idols which would otherwise be left unturned: the bootleg label TMQ (Trademark of Quality) soon found themselves to be somewhat a modern day Robin Hood for music fans. Some may agree, some in the industry may not, but either way, they found their way out from the microphones of the fans who attended the shows to the masses through independent record shops tiptoeing around those blasted legalities through labelling them as imported recordings made in other countries, thereby neatly sidestepping the ‘bootleg’ label. And while the format of bootlegs changed from vinyl to tape cassette to compact disc, the much coveted Hot Wacks underground magazine became the universal bootlegging bible and bootlegging became the hobby for die-hard music fans.

So what’s changed between now and then? Napster came and went, and in it’s wake the internet has become the prime calling point for new music to filter out to the masses, with even the biggest bands such as Radiohead or Nine Inch Nails embracing the technology. But where does this leave bootlegging? Better than ever. Before we continue, let’s clarify a few terms. Bootleg refers to the practice of recording concerts, packaging them and selling them for profit, while live recording refers to the practice of recording and trading the physical recording without profit. Therefore, when referring to online trading, the better phrase to use is live recordings, unless it is somewhat for profit, which it rarely is. The question is, how has the internet (and, as an extension, the birth and evolution of digital equipment) improved the practice? Firstly, focusing purely on the online aspect of it, new technologies have enabled higher quality recordings to be shared faster and easier than ever – the most popular and therefore number one choice for bootleg collectors is Bittorrent. For those who don’t know, a brief overview from Wikipedia:

“BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing protocol used to distribute large amounts of data. The initial distributor of the complete file or collection acts as the first seed. Each peer who downloads the data also uploads them to other peers. Relative to standard internet hosting, this provides a significant reduction in the original distributor’s hardware and bandwidth resource costs. It also provides redundancy against system problems and reduces dependence on the original distributor.“

So essentially, the spreading of a file over Bittorrent relies on a community sharing chunks of the file to each other – the more people that join the torrent and therefore actively share chunks of the data, the faster the file download is for everyone. This fits in perfectly with the online trading ethos – give a little, get a little. This is extended to the point whereby on trackers (i.e. servers that host the torrents and index the contents) that specialise in live recording trading, a high share ratio is needed in order to download more recordings. This, of course, leads to new torrents being created in order to up the ratio, creating an online community that is bursting to the seams with music that is simply begging to be discovered.

Let’s take the private tracker Dime-a-Dozen (or EZTorrent) as an example. the site only houses 110,000 users at once, at which point registrations to the tracker are closed – if a user’s share ratio is too low or they have become inactive on the site, then their account is deleted and space is made for a new user. In this way, a tight-knit, ever active community is constantly uploading new files (or reuploading dead files), and it is in this way online bootlegging is kept alive. How is this superior to the old style of bootleg trading, though?

1. Better availability of recordings: The recordings on the online trackers are, if popular, there for months, even years. This eliminates the need to trawl trade lists or newsgroups in order to find the exact bootleg you need, replaced with a search engine online. Even if the original recording’s torrent is dead, there’s always somewhere to ask if it’s wanted.
2. Wider range of sources: For the more popular recordings, a number of different sources for one show recording is often uploaded – this makes getting a bootleg and the quality being unlistenable strictly a pre-internet problem.
3. Community input: Not only do the community comment on the sound quality of recordings and setlist discrepancies (and thus improve the overall quality), but due to the range of consumer-level sound manipulation software on the market, many recordings can be mastered to an almost professional level.

And so online bootlegging is, of course, beneficial to the consumer. But how about the artists? Surely the act of packaging their music and giving it away is akin to piracy? The short answer here is that the potential fiscal loss from allowing recordings to be spread around the internet is much, much smaller than the problem of piracy. The long answer is spreading the recordings is always going to be such a minor nuisance that artists cannot plausibly encounter financial loss that would affect them – the hobby of collecting, recording and trading bootlegs for a band is strictly amongst the hardcore fans of the band who collect these recordings as a testament to their support for the band’s artistic output. These are the fans who would buy anything with the band’s name graced upon it – take my love of Nine Inch Nails, for example. I own every single studio album, live album, remix album and EP on CD, as well as a good few of the singles, both the live DVDs, 2 shirts, tickets to two of their shows and a few vinyl releases to boot. As well as this, I own two burnt recordings of shows of theirs I went to, which sit proudly upon the shelf. Clearly, there is no financial loss for the band there.

However, a major deterrent for bands to allow show recordings is the artistic loss; that is, their artistic works (i.e. the songs) being shared in less than perfect quality. Kings of Leon and Mastodon are both bands that have recently shown their distaste for playing new songs live, due to within the space of a day a myriad of low-quality camera-phone recorded videos of said new songs appearing on Youtube and ruining the artist’s vision. Brent Hinds of Mastodon elaborates in an interview with Drowned in Sound:

“No, we’re not playing any new material. We tried that already and all these kids ended up streaming it on YouTube. It’s just a shit sound and we want the album to come out first.“

Of course, any music punter can see that after a gig many, many videos will flood Youtube for the masses to see, and of course, excited fans who didn’t go to the gig will flock to the video to catch a glimpse of what their musical heroes have got brewing for them. This could either be an excellent way of raising excitement for a new album, or, for the most part what fans and the bands alike believe, a poor representative that spoils the final product.  On the other hand, some bands embrace the idea of fans being able to record their shows – Grateful Dead is one such band, who promote recording of the shows in order to share. Although the amount of microphone stands in the crowd eventually got unbearable for the sound crew, eventually a special “tapers area” behind the soundboard was made in order to please the whole crowd. More recently Counting Crows adopted the same technique, a testement to the effectiveness of allowing tapers into the shows.

All in all, online bootlegging can only be a good thing for music fans – enough of a niche activity to not affect the band’s financial profit, good enough quality to appease said fans (and with the collectibility that niche interests also enjoy), and a way to introduce friends into bands you’ve seen or to show off a band that excels in a live setting, the internet has boosted bootlegging from a Camden street corner to a community-based project for fans to cherish their revered shows for years to come.

And the Sex Pistols bootlegs I was talking about? Why, they’re on Dime now. And so the cycle continues.

 

Is Reading Festival truly devoid of soul?

80,000 patrons decend on the Reading Festival arena daily over the August bank holiday weekend, a collosal ending to the ‘festival season’ of sorts that extends from Glastonbury in late June, through the T in the Park and Oxegen festivals in July, and ends in August with the likes of V Festival and Reading Festival. These are only the major festivals; trace back almost every weekend in the summer months and there is a festival to be found – Green Man, Latitiude, Lovebox, Z008, Offset, Standon Calling, Bloodstock, Download, Field Day, Connect to name but a few – many of which have been founded in the last couple of years following the more ‘alternative’ and ‘indie’ rock crossing over into mainstream radio play. Of course, as popularity of the music increases, so does the demand for the festivals, with Reading and Leeds selling out in mere seconds (even the 2009 presale tickets).

One problem – if Reading/Leeds sells out so fast, how is there time to look at the line up and consider if it’s worth the money (currently at £165 (not including booking fees) and rising)? The answer: you don’t. Which could logically mean only a few things:

1. The line up is predictable enough to base buying a ticket for, or
2. The broader appeal is in the event itself as opposed to the actual music.

First, focus on the implications of the first point – what bands have the festivals provided in the last couple of years? 2007 featured almost the entire roster of artists on the Decaydance label (Fall Out Boy, Cobra Starship, Gym Class Heroes, The Academy Is… and Panic At The Disco all making an appearance at the festival) – all of which impacted in the UK albums and singles charts. Again consider 2007 for the rise of dance/electronic based indie/rock – the Klaxons managed to secure a headlining slot on the second biggest stage on the back of their debut album, while CSS, Hadouken!, New Young Pony Club and Jamie T all were placed on the same stage on the same day. Can this attribute of booking the most popular alternative genres of the last couple of years be the reason for the massively swelling popularity of the festival, considering tickets didn’t sell out within the hour before, say, 2006? I do not believe so. Take the line up of Reading 1993 as a perfect example – Ned’s Atomic Dustbin, Butthole Surfers, Tool, Dinosaur Jr, Primus, Jesus Lizard, Swervedriver and The Flaming Lips all played the festival, and are all examples of early 90s alternative hard rock (bordering the bridge between the popularity of Shoegaze, which secured Chapterhouse, Catherine Wheel and Swervedriver places in 1991, and the popularity of Grunge, which did the same for Smashing Pumpkins, Soundgarden and Mudhoney in 1995).

So while the line-up may be predictable enough to cause the massive popularity Reading has embraced in recent years, flicking through previous line ups and comparing musical trends indicates that the music’s popularity isn’t so much a factor in the seemingly random mainstream appeal festivals have recieved – which leaves the second point, that the event itself precedes importance over the music, and taken that the event is centered around music, it seems almost paradoxical that this is even possible. However, quick musing around the summer’s mainstream media turns up results which are less “rock” as Reading was once percieved to be – no, in fact if you happened to chance upon the June issue of Grazia, you’d find the front cover showing ‘all the latest festival fashions’. Since when did a magazine designed for 18-40 year old women with interests in celebrity culture, fashion and dieting become entagled with the traditionally more alternative and arguably masculine, muddy festival stereotype? “Time to channel your best Kate Moss at Glastonbury-inspired outfit, pull on your gumboots and get rocking“, Grazia tells us – is this really the festival way, to festival for the sake of looking like your fashion idol? Have I got the wrong end of the stick? And more importantly, is this the reason why Reading Festival seems so damn devoid of the soul and spirit I found in smaller festivals such as Lovebox?

While it could just be a coincidence that Grazia latching onto festivals and the rest of the women’s weeklies clinging on like leeches trying to spot their favorite celebrities as the mean age of festival goers invariably falls, it’s a sad but true fact that the once mightly Reading Festival is being overtaken by younger audiences more focused on boozing up to the nines and finding facebook photo opportunities than having a true passion for the music – it’s an all too common occurance that a drunken troupé would shove into the middle of a crowd of a band that had that one big single, where they would shout to each other and take pictures of each other through the entire set until that one single begrudgingly flickered into life, where they’d suddenly burst into life by jumping around shouting along to the riff/synth line, before promptly leaving to get some more booze. Even at the most popular of gigs, this is usually a minor problem, but at a festival it seems acceptable – “we can do it because it’s Reading [or, indeed, most larger festivals]” being taken as a mantra, as a new way of life at festivals.

And not only are the crowd likely to be amoungst the worst or unappreciative for any type of music event (see the FF’ers disaster of 2008 where the band got bottled for not being the Foo Fighters), but the music specifically at Reading is starting to become dreary and uninspired; Dance Tents become more dance-flavored rock with CSS and Robots in Disguise, as opposed to the UNKLE, Coldcut and Aphex Twin of old, but bands are being put on the bill year after year at an alarming rate, The Subways for instance playing for 5 years straight, and both Biffy Clyro and Bloc Party playing 3 times in 4 years. Where’s the true variety? We want real dance! We want real hip hop, not just a couple of grime acts every year! We want more interesting, more experimental acts! We don’t just want new bands with a couple of older ones thrown in, we want a decent mix!

Or is that ‘we’? Is ‘we’, the music loving section of the populace, now not the main audience for Reading or Leeds? Is the real ‘we’ now the fashion obsessed, mediocre music listener looking to booze it up in a field? Music fans, read and weep: we have been outphased, our very tastes an outdated business model for the big promoters such as Festival Republic, and the new model, the new audience, becoming lucrative enough to draw in a whole host of new festivals offering nothing new, many of which collapsing under such pressures (Z008 being a disaster as well as Wild In The Country). And while the real music fans have been edged out of larger festivals, and turn towards the smaller festivals for their fix of remotely interesting music, such as the ATP festivals, something tells me that the larger festival bubble will surely sometime in the next couple of years burst – while I’m not hoping for collapse of an icon such as Reading and Leeds festivals, maybe it’s for the best interests of real music fans.

Or maybe I’m a massive narcisstic pretentious snob. Who knows.

 

ATP Nightmare Before Xmas 2008 [(No longer a) Rumour]

“Mike Patton and Melvins are set to curate this year’s Nightmare Before Christmas, ATP’s annual festival held in Minehead, UK in December.”

(Source: http://rock-a-rolla.com/main/?p=18)

If true, this is quite simply the best festival in the UK this year… who says a festival has to be in the summer? Swaying away from the usual festival suspects (Duffy, CSS, Manic Street Preachers – looking straight at you), Mike Patton vs Melvins could potentially include:

• Peeping Tom
• Fantomas
• Melvins
• Mike Patton
• Melvins/Fantomas Big Band
• Melvins/Lustmord
• Tomahawk

And that’s just those two artists alone – other linked artists which could (or could not) play are:

• Isis
• Boris (maybe with Sunn O))))
• Unsane
• Slayer (Dave Lombardo, drummer of Slayer, is also in Fantomas)
• Dub Trio

Mike Patton’s taste is music is noutorious for it’s incredibly electicity, so apart from the obvious linked bands, pretty much anyone could play. Forget the summer festivals – if rumours are true, then this is the festival to be at. Plus, you get to go on the go-karts (being in Butlins and all). Awesome.

EDIT:

Yep, it’s true. That strange popping sound is the sound of a legion of Mike Patton fanboys all over the country exploding from the sheer promise of Melvins and Mike Patton together with water flumes and chalets.

The line up so far is as followed, with more to come:

Chosen by Melvins: Melvins, Isis, Neil Hamburger, Dälek, Big Business

Chosen by Mike Patton: Fantômas perform The Director’s Cut, The Locust, Zu.

The price of the festival is around £140 per person (not including booking charge) – however, accomodation is compulsory for the festival (and, to be frank, hanging out in chalets instead of tents at a festival is a welcome change), and come in 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 or 7 berth chalets – 4 berth and higher self accomodating. Tickets are available from Seetickets or wegottickets.

More on it as it comes in.

P.S. The Hawk/You’ve Never Been Right – Melvins (Live Norway 2007)