Bootlegging

Bootlegger who amassed £15m fortune from pirate CDs jailed says the Guardian with a similar report yesterday on BBC news. Ah, you might think, this is where all that piracy that the RIAA and other blame their falling sales on  - when they're not blaming internet file sharers of course - is coming from.

However if you read the article more closely you realise that the correct part of  the headline is in fact bootlegger. This man is not copying offical CDs and selling them on as cuonterfeits to unsuspecting 10 year old Busted fans. He's selling recordings of live shows and other otherwise unavailable material.

Now obviously there are copyright issues here - it's not fair for him to be making £14 profit per CD and the artist making nothing.  Of course with legal CDs the artist always gets a cut of the sales don't they (answer: no). However the repeated claim that the irecord industry and artists are losing millions is just rubbish - note also the order of importance "not only to recording companies but also to performers and composers".

What fan buys a bootleg of a concert for £15 in preference to a legal recording, probably for a tenner off an online CD store? You buy a bootleg once you've already exhausted the official material available by that artist - or at least the stuff that you are interested in. It's incredible to me that these people believe they would make even a penny more without bootlegs around.

The only scandal here really is the high price he charges for the CDs. Up front costs are small so he could sell them for a fiver and still make a tidy sum. Of course at that point he would also be undercutting the official releases and so there would be a temptation for some to buy the cheaper lower quality release over the more expensive, but better produced, official live album. So really the record companies should be grateful that he was so greedy.