Anyone ever buy bootleg music?

Sports & Music

Moderators: AArdvark, Ice Cream Jonsey

User avatar
AArdvark
Posts: 16107
Joined: Tue May 14, 2002 6:12 pm
Location: Rochester, NY

Anyone ever buy bootleg music?

Post by AArdvark »

I was in my tape box yesterday and found my Zed Zeppelin Blueberry Hill dub that I recorded from an album from a guy I knew way back when. I got to wondering if anyone has ever bought a bootleg album.

THE
PSST, HEY!
AARDVARK

User avatar
Ice Cream Jonsey
Posts: 28842
Joined: Sat Apr 27, 2002 2:44 pm
Location: Colorado
Contact:

Re: Anyone ever buy bootleg music?

Post by Ice Cream Jonsey »

Music, no. As of today I have now bought Steam keys for two games off a reseller because the games originally took the Epic Store exclusive deal.

What was buying bootleg music like? I want to feel the experience through you. I want to be your ears. Your eyes. Your penis. Did I say your ears?
the dark and gritty...Ice Cream Jonsey!

User avatar
Flack
Posts: 8820
Joined: Tue Nov 18, 2008 3:02 pm
Location: Oklahoma
Contact:

Re: Anyone ever buy bootleg music?

Post by Flack »

I bought a shit ton of bootleg concert VHS tapes. Does that count?
"I failed a savings throw and now I am back."

User avatar
Jizaboz
Posts: 4788
Joined: Tue Jan 31, 2012 2:00 pm
Location: USA
Contact:

Re: Anyone ever buy bootleg music?

Post by Jizaboz »

Yeah I had 1 GWAR bootleg VHS tape I bought in Myrtle Beach. Sound quality was really, really bad haha

At point I had a bootleg cassette tape of Nirvana - Outcesticide though.
(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

User avatar
Tdarcos
Posts: 9329
Joined: Fri May 16, 2008 9:25 am
Location: Arlington, Virginia
Contact:

Re: Anyone ever buy bootleg music?

Post by Tdarcos »

One time I bought (what I did not know was) a bootleg DVD of the recent movie Crimson Tide, only paid $10 for it. The cover artwork was a bit fuzzy and the distributor wasn't a studio, it was a company located in "HKSAR" which I later discovered is "Hong Kong, Special Administrative Region," of China. I think I realized it was when I was buying it or shortly thereafter. No real thought or feeling about it.

One time I was visiting Baltimore with my brother, and we stopped at the World Famous Lexington Market, which has been open since 1789. When we were there it was open 7 days a week, until 9 or so. Vendors there were selling pirated disks; you could tell, because they had jewel cases and the CDs had decent printing, if you looked on the bottom of the CD, it was the tell-tale greenish-yellow color instead of silvers, and the disk cases were not shrink wrapped the way they are in stores. I didn' buy any; there was nothing I was interested in, and I think I was kind of spoiled by what I'd been able to do with Napster a decade earlier.

This would have been in July, 2009 as I was taking him there for his birthday.
Evil cannot create anything new
They can only corrupt and ruin
What good forces have invented or made.
- J.R.R. Tolkien

User avatar
RealNC
Posts: 2244
Joined: Wed Mar 07, 2012 4:32 am

Re: Anyone ever buy bootleg music?

Post by RealNC »

I bought some back in the late 90s. Downloading whole albums back then was very difficult. Even if you found what you're looking for, dial-up costs were higher than buying a pirated CD for a couple bucks. The quality of the discs themselves was poor. The cheapest of the cheap. They would go bad only after a year or two. The quality of the audio though was excellent. They were actual CD rips, not burned from MP3s.

For some reason, only black people would sell them. They'd usually go around town and ask people sitting in bars or cafeterias if they want to buy some CDs or DVDs. In all my life, I have never seen anyone who wasn't black sell pirated CDs that way. This became a new stereotype. If you were black, you had to sell pirated CDs.

User avatar
Flack
Posts: 8820
Joined: Tue Nov 18, 2008 3:02 pm
Location: Oklahoma
Contact:

Re: Anyone ever buy bootleg music?

Post by Flack »

Oh, I forgot this story. When I was in Las Vegas, this guy stopped me while I was walking down the strip and said he was an up and coming rapper and wanted me to pay $10 for his CD that he had obviously burned himself. I said no way, but I'd give him five because I love music and wanted to support him. I gave the guy five bucks and when I got home and listened to the CD, it was pretty good! Then later one of my kids recognized one of the songs and it turns out the guy had just made a copy of some R&B artist's CD and was selling it with a fake cover with his own picture on it.
"I failed a savings throw and now I am back."

User avatar
AArdvark
Posts: 16107
Joined: Tue May 14, 2002 6:12 pm
Location: Rochester, NY

Re: Anyone ever buy bootleg music?

Post by AArdvark »

I want to be your ears. Your eyes. Your penis.
You do NOT want to be my penis, you'd die of ennui.

Buying bootleg music was essentially going into the Record Archive and asking the clerk (who knew my friend) if there was any new live music. the clerk would look shifty for a moment and then go into the back room and return with a box of albums nobody had ever seen before. I remember he paid something like $75 dollars for the Led Zeppelin Blueberry Hill album. (note: I doubt the owner knew about the inflated prices) And here's the thing, they were always crap. The album artwork was blurry and cheap-looking. The audio was second rate and usually had drunk or stoned people talking over the music ("dude, my ears ringing!") that line was from Led Zeppelin in Adelaide Australia, I think.
And most always the recording would have parts of a song cut out because the bootlegger didn't bring enough tape to record the whole thing. But they were great because you had something few other people had so it made you feel far superior in some way.

And yes, bootleg VHS tapes count, it's pretty much the same thing.

THE
WHOLE LOTTA
AARDVARK

Casual Observer
Posts: 3258
Joined: Wed Oct 01, 2003 10:23 pm
Location: Everett, WA, 2 blocks from where the Green River Killer picked them up

Re: Anyone ever buy bootleg music?

Post by Casual Observer »

I thought bootlegs were supposed to be free, passed around like the old mix cassettes we used to make from the radio in our boomboxes. Certainly I got a bunch of bootlegs off Napster but that was stealing.

User avatar
Flack
Posts: 8820
Joined: Tue Nov 18, 2008 3:02 pm
Location: Oklahoma
Contact:

Re: Anyone ever buy bootleg music?

Post by Flack »

AArdvark wrote: Wed Jul 01, 2020 5:30 pm And yes, bootleg VHS tapes count, it's pretty much the same thing.
In the early 90s, I was shopping at a flea market and ran across a VHS copy of a local concert I had attended. I was familiar with audio bootlegs, but this was the first video bootleg I had ever run across. I ended up buying four or five VHS bootlegs from that dealer over a few different trips. I paid $20-$30 per tape, which was pretty expensive when you're delivering pizzas.

Fast forward to the mid/late-90s and a couple of my friends got into the tape trading scene (all videos). People were putting up websites with their lists of videos. You had to list the artist, the date of the concert, the length, the generation of the copy, and then a quality rating (from A to F). Most people only traded one tape for one tape, but some traders would do 2:1 blanks, which meant if you sent them two blank tapes, they would copy a bootleg for you on one, and keep the other blank as payment. There were all kinds of rules in this world. If you initiated the trade you had to send first, which meant you had to mail your tape(s) first and then hope that they eventually mailed their tapes to you (usually they did, sometimes they didn't). Also, all tapes had to be recorded in LP (two hour) mode, for best quality.

One of my friends was into alternative music, the other was into classic rock, and I was into heavy metal, so we decided that if we combined all three of our lists into one big list, we would have more to trade with other people. So, that's what we did. Over several years, my collection grew to a couple hundred tapes. I had Metallica tapes, Pantera tapes, Marilyn Manson tapes... just this huge tape collection. I got so into tape trading that I bought a $300 double-decker VCR just for dubbing tapes. All you had to do was press one button and it would rewind both tapes, copy the tape in the top deck to the bottom one, and then eject them both.

Toward the end of this particular hobby, a local Blockbuster went out of business and I discovered that they were throwing all their plastic clamshells out in giant trashbags. I drove over there and took two or three large bags of them. Then I used photoshop to make custom covers for all my bootlegs.

Somewhere in this post I should mention that I very rarely watched these tapes more than once. Many of them were very poor quality. Some were recorded by people standing in the audience, so the video would be all jumpy and blurry.

In 2012 (according to my blog), I ended up tossing out the entire collection (save for about five tapes). Tapes that were super rare (and super expensive) just a few years earlier were being uploaded to Youtube. I had half a dozen Metallica shows; now there are literally hundreds of professionally shot ones on Youtube. It was a fun hobby to get involved in but like a lot of other things, the internet eventually made it obsolete.

Image
"I failed a savings throw and now I am back."

Casual Observer
Posts: 3258
Joined: Wed Oct 01, 2003 10:23 pm
Location: Everett, WA, 2 blocks from where the Green River Killer picked them up

Re: Anyone ever buy bootleg music?

Post by Casual Observer »

Wow, what a colossal waste of time and polyethylene. What kills me about this is the people i work with have no idea what we went through with media containers.

User avatar
Flack
Posts: 8820
Joined: Tue Nov 18, 2008 3:02 pm
Location: Oklahoma
Contact:

Re: Anyone ever buy bootleg music?

Post by Flack »

Casual Observer wrote: Fri Jul 03, 2020 7:07 am Wow, what a colossal waste of time and polyethylene.
Hey ICJ, is there a phpBB add-on you could install to automatically generate condescending zingers from Casual Observer? It would save him the time from having to come up with one every single time I post.
"I failed a savings throw and now I am back."

Casual Observer
Posts: 3258
Joined: Wed Oct 01, 2003 10:23 pm
Location: Everett, WA, 2 blocks from where the Green River Killer picked them up

Re: Anyone ever buy bootleg music?

Post by Casual Observer »

Flack wrote: Fri Jul 03, 2020 9:12 am
Casual Observer wrote: Fri Jul 03, 2020 7:07 am Wow, what a colossal waste of time and polyethylene.
Hey ICJ, is there a phpBB add-on you could install to automatically generate condescending zingers from Casual Observer? It would save him the time from having to come up with one every single time I post.
He'd need to integrate some badass AI for that.

Post Reply