Bootlegs.bandcamp.com

Hello Earth,

Okay, so I had this idea to create a place online where you can listen to and download bootlegs taken from live performances of various bands - for FREE!!! It's all thanks to bandcamp really.

bootlegs.bandcamp.com

Most bands are okay with this sort of thing I think. I'll have to obviously check first before I start uploading everything, but for the most part, this is free live music recorded by fans and shared with other fans for the sake of furthering the interest and promotion of music. I am not interested in selling or buying in this sort of thing as that would be illegal whichever way you look at it. It's all for free.

I have a number of bootlegs myself and will be uploading them regularly in the following months.

(It takes a fair amount of time and I want to make a good job of it and include lyrics and photo's etc... so it's not just a case of simply uploading a huge file.)

Radiohead are going to be the obvious choice to begin with for many reasons:

1) They are probably my favourite band of all time.

2) I have a whole bunch of live bootlegs from them. Some of which are of gigs I actually went to, and so there's this need that I have to proudly display those recordings and say, 'I was there!'

3) They are a very popular band with fans that will almost certainly appreciate what I am doing and get the whole 'recording of gigs and sharing online' thing.

It's very strange as even though bootlegs are not exactly a new thing, I never fail to be amazed at the amount of people that go to gigs and do not think to either record it themselves somehow, or look for a recording online afterwards from someone else. For some reason it just doesn't occur to people - or fans of certain bands - that it be done. Then again, last year I came across someone who had never heard of getting setlists from the stage. I also met another person who didn't understand what a soundcheck was. You tend to come across people like this as a result of free local festivals. I guess you have to start somewhere though.

Anyway, it probably about a decade ago (gasp!) that I spent a brief period of my life obsessed with swaping bootlegs, as in actual physical cdr's with people all over the world. It's actually quite amusing to be now that this is what i used to do. I wasn't overly internet savvy at the time and knew nothing about online file sharing or anything like that. There was plenty of other people that did it though, and it was quite good fun. A hobbyist sort of thing. Searching for the bootlegs you wanted, negotiating swaps, (remined me a lot of collecting pogs at school!) and sending them through the post. You also had to rely on each other's trust to an extent.

I'm pretty sure this was the website I used to use for it: http://www.tapetrader.com/

There doesn't seem to be much going on there at the minute. I don't really know if the whole tape trading thing is active anymore. But at the time it enabled me to get lots of radiohead bootlegs so i was happy! The funny thing is that I got into Radiohead through my older brother and he had the first three albums on cd and for years I just used to steal them. But then he moved out and I just became content with listening to live Radiohead music only and for some reason it took me years before I would revisit and purchase the studio albums again.

But there you have it. The website is up, currently with just one complete show. I'll tell you more about that in a second...

Girl from Winter Jargon

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