Following on from the post on here late last year; I noticed that my local dealer and HMV in York have loads of CDs of pre DSOTM live gigs (many of which I had on bootleg cassettes 30 years ago.
I wondered about the 50 year copyright explanation; but that does not explain CDs from Genesis’s Lamb tour or Supertramp post 1973 boots? Perhaps copyright holders are getting ahead of themselves?
Can the massive elucidate?
Has anyone got any strong recommendations?
“Bootleg” recordings from 1973 onwards on CD in HMV
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?”Imports”? from italy or Japan and now cheaper as they are punting old CD stock they can barely sell except to the pensioner market?
My understanding is that these live discs were all originally radio broadcasts which were never copyrighted and hence are effectively in the public domain. If you were an internet-savvy fan of a particular artist you’d probably already downloaded exactly the same audio from Dime or the like.
I think that is correct – there are numerous cds in HMV for Springsteen, Grateful dead etc that were taken from radio broadcasts in the US – the cds often say on the back ‘not for sale in US’ so maybe different laws there?
The Floyd releases I think perhaps relate to the 50 year copyright rule?
https://www.brain-damage.co.uk/latest/early-70s-live-pink-floyd-recordings-released.html
Yeah, there are loads of them available in all the usual places.
I have a handful of Talking Heads CDs and there are at least three I know of, with different titles, featuring the same gig.
Going into a shop and paying money for CDs of these things. Do people not have computers?
Thanks all
I think now that many of the CDs I saw are from Radio Broadcasts (U.S. mainly).
Curiously Amazon music has heaps of these on their streaming service. I wonder how this works?
You pay your subs to Amazon music then click on play. 🤣🥸😂
Yeah thx Baron. The legality is more the issue.
Cut-and-run companies put them up to Amazon, who are happy to take a profit until the cease-and-desist orders come through. Then they will instantly remove them, claiming to have acted in good faith. The companies who offered them up to Amazon will just melt away and it will be deemed too costly for rights owners to chase them.
And it will be called something else though it is the same show.
Very common to find these concert CDs (along with Beatles outtakes) on retail in Japan, even in high street shops like Tower Records: I assumed it was lax copyright enforcement, but nothing stops it spreading among online sellers I guess.
The owners of the publishing rights for the songs have a solid case if they aren’t getting paid publishing royalties on the sales of bootlegged recordings.
On performance rights, if the recordings in question have been widely traded for any length of time, without any enforcement against them by the artists, a cease-and-desist order is probably the best the artists can hope for without expensive legal wrangling. Labels have a particularly shaky case on performance rights if the recordings were made outside of official sessions or if all recording and production expenses were recouped at the time by deduction from artists royalties. There are numerous cases of artists releasing old live recordings and studio outtakes themselves after their contracts with labels have expired.
You don’t have to go to Japan. In the mid 90s I was in a very ordinary record shop in Coutances, in Normandie. They were selling a very handsomely produced 4CD Beatles box set called The Long and Winding Road. It was a straight compo, really just an expanded red and blue albums, but totally unofficial. Copyright? “Bof….putain!”
That was obviously before he invaded Ukraine.
He was really just twiddling his thumbs in the Yeltsin years.
Well, mostly breaking other people’s thumbs, but same difference.
Amazon has been selling these “grey area” radio broadcasts for about a decade. Springsteen, Stones, Beatles, Young etc
Indeed they have. Did I not read somewhere that most of these come from radio broadcasts and as such were property of the radio station, not the artist? Radio Winnipeg or Charleston Agricultural College is hardly likely to go chasing bootleggers
The point is that no-one at Amazon, HMV or any other record store checks the legal situation of these releases. There will always be a wholesale trader who buys a couple of hundreds of these bootlegs (you only have to spend half an hour at the parking lot of the Utrecht or Brighton record fairs: lots of big boxes being loaded from one van into another…) and lists them in his monthly catalog. Of course everyone at a record shop knows that any Springsteen CD not on Sony is illegal – these loopholes such as copyright extinction or radio broadcasts are just that: loopholes. If anyone sues, it’s business as usual as described above, »sorry, we didn’t notice…«, and everyone shows up again a couple of months later under a new company name.
There’s a compelling case to be made re bootlegging taking away much needed revenue from artists , aside from breaking the law, is there anything wrong with “Deep Purple Live from KJNM, 1975” being available to anyone foolish enough to want it?
Yes, it’s got Deep Purple on it.
I wouldn’t have thought the Purps had many fans in Fayetteville, AR.
Disagree.
Think most people who buy live/studio outtake boots are going to be fans who would buy the albums if they were officially released.
The boots that cost artists money are the illegal copies of legit albums that casual record buyers pick up – often while they’re on holiday
Yep
Given that New Order have not included their BBC simulcast on their forthcoming Low Life box set, perhaps I should ‘remaster’ the TDK D90 I recorded on my Bush getto-blaster from wunnerful Ray-dee-oh Wun* FM, and release it myself.
Was it Radio Two FM in 1984?
Yes, it would have been. Radio One didn’t get its own FM frequency until 1988.
See, it’s not just you who can be dull.
That’s my point your making..
The thing with live concert bootlegs is that usually the artists and their labels have worked out there’s only so much material you can release in a particular time period and expect to cover the cost of doing so. There just aren’t enough hardcore buy-anything fans for even the biggest acts.
Say Brooce releases an album, the fans flock to the shops to buy it and then he tours it. He most probably won’t be releasing a live tour album because it would (a) reduce the sales of the studio album and (b) probably not sell enough copies to cover the cost of the recording, mixing, mastering and promotion, if he released it too soon after the studio effort.
Of course stolen or copied masters are a completely different story. They can really hurt an artist.
Bruce seems have made an awful lot of live stuff available online to download, which I reckon is a pretty good idea as it gives the hardcore fans what they want, and is presumably properly mastered and so on, as well as the money going directly to the artists. The Stones started doing this a while ago too, but that seems to have died the death – although the website still exists it doesn’t seem to have much except expensive box sets and tat, and half the links don’t even work.
Robert Fripp and his business partner/producer David Singleton started up the King Crimson Collectors Club in the early 2000s to supply live recordings, outtakes etc. to Crimson fans who wanted them, in best-available sound quality.
IIRC it was initially a subscription scheme where you paid a certain amount for membership and could choose, from the club catalogue, CDs to receive by mail. It still exists, but no longer in that form AFAIK. There are a vast amount of KCCC recordings available. Some in vinyl or CD format, most now as FLAC downloads.
Thanks for warning us!
i don’t know how much remastering is done as the Bruce shows are available in pretty short turnaround. No doubt speed to market is key as people are likely to buy the download of the show they saw. Maybe the Stones shows didn’t sound so good night after night.
I don’t see why more acts don’t do it – provided they are confident in consistency of performance. After all the marginal costs a low. A feed from the mixing desk, insert track markers and whack it up on the pay fordownload dooverlackey and any sales are largely profit.
A friend in the biz (how I like saying that) tells me most of Bruce’s concert recording sales come from “That legendary night in Baltimore 1975 ” or Rome ’83 when he tore the Coliseum down”. These historical artefacts have all been lovingly remastered and available on his website at very reasonable prices. I guess if you were in Rome or Baltimore they’d be essential.
He didn’t tour in 83!
Two things here, there are the monthly archive releases that are great value, but the mastering is variable. Official live albums get more attention, however we have gotten effectively 86 live albums from most periods of his career. Some of the best of these mainly from 1978 were originally radio broadcasts
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Springsteen_Archives
Then when he is on tour every show is released a few days later, or this has been the case for last few tours. These are relatively basic soundboard recordings but some still sound great, more a souvenir if you were at the show I think.
He didn’t tour in 83? Next you’ll be telling me he didn’t tear the Coliseum down. I’ve see pictures of the Coliseum: sure looks torn down to me.
Not sure that there ‘aren’t enough hardcore buy-anything fans for even the biggest acts.’
Only a few years ago there were oodles of very high quality recordings of Dead shows available either in flac or shn lossless formats from ArchiveDOTOrg, but then the DeadBreadheads stepped in and stopped the downloads in their tracks – you can still stream the recordings, but you can no longer download them to your own machine in a lossless format.
The Dead’s marketing team must have had a commercial motive for such a brutal intrusion into the Dead fan’s hippy dream life of endless bootleg heaven. The miserable tightwad breadhead bastards.
@Vulpes-Vulpes
Bummer
I’m sure @vulpes-vulpes already knows this, but there are ways around this kind of thing. I use Black Hole (on a Mac) to capture whatever audio is playing and send it to Garageband to produce an AIFF file, which I can then safely file away and probably never listen to. It’s the modern taping off the radio.
@kid-dynamite
Yes indeed, and on a PC it’s easy to do the same (i.e. equivalent) thing using Audacity. With the Dead shows the irritation is that the streams are only MP3s (IIRC they are 128 ones) while the original source files are lossless of one sort or another.
Luckily, I got tipped off to the existence of these recordings when I strolled into a hippy shop on a Canary Island one day to the sound of a stellar performance of ‘Sugar Magnolia’. As the song ended and morphed into ‘Cryptical Envelopment’ or whatever it was next, it became obvious that I was listening to a live Dead recording that was completely new to me. I asked the long haired chappy at the till what the music was that he was playing, and he brought a huge folder full of CD-Rs out from under the desk, filled with Dead and other desirable recordings and explained that he’d downloaded them all from the Archive. On returning to Blighty I promply plundered the Archive comprehensively, just in time to avoid the breadhead intervention – the recordings on the Archive are all star-rated for quality, so I took loads of the best five star SBDs. I think I’ve got at least 30 or 40 of their best shows that way, not all of which have subsequently been ‘picked’, by Dick or anyone else, for commercial release.
More Floyd releases from DSOTM era
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/pink-floyd-unreleased-dark-side-era-concerts-streaming-services-1234649343/