I do feel like the old days of napster when I look at some of that stuff. I Iistened to a Billy Bragg show on it today, a 1988 one, while I was working. I attended shows in that tour. Is it illegally recorded? Yes. Will I listen to others? Yes. If such a show were available to purchase, I'd pay up first. It isn't, so I equivocate. It seems like walking by a club and hearing a show for free.
Would I contribute to funding that site? Nope.
But maybe that bird has flown, since every show seems to be recorded on phones now. I'm not sure how things stand because of that - every concert goer seems to show me footage of when their favourite songs were played. Personal use? Ideally, they don't put it on the net.
I think a lot of that stuff was sold online, or at least shared online, over many years. I had a student who was a bootleg collector in the digital era, and who stayed in the house for a bit when I found him homeless after graduation. He was working but hadn't earned enough for a flat yet, and after two paycheques, he was out of there. When I helped him get his stuff out of storage, I'm almost certain he showed me burned cds of some of the Replacements gigs I checked today. It's hard to recognize a badly recorded show by a loud band, but it seems very familiar.
So maybe there's more to this guy's hobby than meets the eye. I expect the bigger name artists were digitized 20 years ago, for under the table file sharing.
Back in that everything is free era of the internet, I actually made a point of joining a site that guaranteed payment to the artists. I've had my own work stolen, and wasn't going to go along. Then in time, it was discovered that site wasn't paying its bills to the artists - go figure.
Would I contribute to funding that site? Nope.
But maybe that bird has flown, since every show seems to be recorded on phones now. I'm not sure how things stand because of that - every concert goer seems to show me footage of when their favourite songs were played. Personal use? Ideally, they don't put it on the net.
I think a lot of that stuff was sold online, or at least shared online, over many years. I had a student who was a bootleg collector in the digital era, and who stayed in the house for a bit when I found him homeless after graduation. He was working but hadn't earned enough for a flat yet, and after two paycheques, he was out of there. When I helped him get his stuff out of storage, I'm almost certain he showed me burned cds of some of the Replacements gigs I checked today. It's hard to recognize a badly recorded show by a loud band, but it seems very familiar.
So maybe there's more to this guy's hobby than meets the eye. I expect the bigger name artists were digitized 20 years ago, for under the table file sharing.
Back in that everything is free era of the internet, I actually made a point of joining a site that guaranteed payment to the artists. I've had my own work stolen, and wasn't going to go along. Then in time, it was discovered that site wasn't paying its bills to the artists - go figure.
