I hate the fact that allot of new bootleged stuff is CDR. Some stores still charge the same damn price for CDR bootlegs. Does this piss anyone off also? Im pissed, I know they can put stuff out faster this way but what happened to the good ol days? Thank god for Sabotage.

i think i hear the Paisley Legal Mafioso comin...

What do you mean thank god for Sabotage. Dont EVER think these guys do what they do for the love of the music. Sure they maybe Prince fans but their main reason for bootlegging is profit. The prices "professional bootleggers" charge for their warez is ridiculous. Even worse than the industry they supposed to be at odds with. Ie the music industry. CDR bootlegs are fantastic, genuine Prince fans recording shows and getting them out there to the people is fantastic. Sure if they're expensive there as bad as Sabotage but to make out Sabotage are some kinda of freedom fighters and their piece of the pie is being er..Sabotaged by people doing CDRs is ridiculous. Sell bootlegs cheaper and more people will buy them. Same rules apply whether its legal or not.

I was waiting for someone to fire back at me like that. I understand the price being higher becuase of the quantities made. If you pay good money, the quality of the product should reflect the price. Thats were the sabotage comment came from. I just cant believe that they charge ( sometimes ) the same price for a cdr as they do for cd.

I think the Sabotage, Moonraker and Thunderball releases have been overall better than the npgonlineltd. releases, at least in terms of making available the material I want to hear. Then again, I prefer his music between 1980 - 1989 or so. (a side note: am I the only one who thinks he's at his best when he has interesting people to collaborate with and keep him on his toes, so to speak. This, as oppossed to hired session hands who say "Yessir, may I have another?")

Much as I love his music and continue to see him perform live, I am of the opinion that he is not the best business person in the world, and has engaged in many practices that alienate his fans. Shutting down webmasters who use his copyrighted name being one of them.

And don't get me started on the Crystal Ball fiasco.

While everyone is entitled to their own opinions on these matters, it seems that many to lose objectivity to the way he treats his fans and people in general, due to their deep and intense love for Prince's music.

Anyway, I'm babbling and getting off-topic.

CD-Rs for trade is good.
CD-Rs for sale is bad.

terrencetuppins said:

The bottem line for me is if were only getting the official music from Prince there just would not be enough to keep me interested.

Bootlegs have kept me interested in Prince and kept me buying his official stuff.

PS. CD-R's should not be sold, only traded.

Right on to the last three comments, right on. Its allot of what I left out in my post, and my point of the post

derek said:

I couldn't of said it better, I was just thinking the same thing the other day-

Why are CD's good, but CD-R's bad? I understand that some older players don't like CD-R's, but I've never had a problem playing them. I play CD-R's in a variety of players, including portable Discman-style units, home CD players, car CD players, and computer CD-ROM drives--again, never a problem. (Our oldest CD player is a Sony bookshelf stereo system that dates back to at least 1994.)

Aside the from the cost issues involved in having CD's professionally pressed, a bootlegger is going to have to find a place that'll press the discs on a "no-questions-asked" basis. I'll bet that most CD pressing companies would want some kind of proof that the client either owns the rights to the recordings or has permission from the owner to have the discs pressed. If a bootlegger is doing a small run, why bother with it when he or she can just burn CD-R's?

In a nutshell: if they play the same and sound the same, why does the difference matter?

matt said:

Because CDR's are cheaper than the factory pressed CD's. The quality can be less, with skips or jumps, because they are often, if not always, burned with a normal PC and burner or with a burn-tower. Plus the artwork is often not as good. And with less quality and less costs to produce them, they are often the same price.

And the problem with the pressing companies, nah, if there's money involved, it's not a problem.

Matt's absolutely correct.

And folks, look at it this way...
Back in the old days when some of us started out, we TRADED tapes back and forth through snail mail. There were a SMALL few of us across the country who traded or even knew anything about trading so not only was it kept on a low key level, but it was also something that took ALOT of time and effort to collect these things.
Nowdays all you have to do is download MP3's from Kazaa or whatever and within seconds you have things that some folks had to wait MONTHS for upon initial contact.
So, be glad you get what you get REGARDLESS of the medium.
CDR, MP3, Pressed Bootleg, whatever... Just be glad you don't have to use snail mail to get it
If you guys wanna assist in stoppoing bootlegs or whatever, just make "Tape Trees" and distribute the stuff that way, look at ANY other artists fan base and that is EXACTLY what they do. The Prince fan trading circuit is different than ANY other fan base out there.

Oh, and by the way.. There was a lady named Linda (I won't state her last name here) who sold CASSETTE tapes for $90 a POP back in the day. Don't feel so bad about your $20 CDR

Yeah, and there was another guy in Italy charging around 50 $ for a damn concert on tape !

Bottom line for me is: do not sell unreleased material under any format, just trade it !

JeePee said:

Not at all. Decent quality CDR media are very cheap nowadays. With a modern CD writer, and assuming that the source disk image is fine, you won't get skips or jumps.

There is nothing wrong with CDR, it's every bit as good as CD for audio and you'll get a perfect digital copy of the origial. Most modern CD players are able to read a CDR disk burned with red-book standard (and some even read Joliet with MP3 files nowadays too).

Nothing wrong with CDR.

derek said:

Precisely how I feel. It's a shame P doesn't realise the potential of releasing more live/outtake material.

Sabotage et al may have high prices but it's not really that much higher than what'reputable' record stores charge for official music. And then the music industry has the cheek to moan about a drop in sales figures!

Q - What's the difference between a pirate copy and a bootleg copy?

I'm sitting here reading about artwork quality and the merits of CD vs. CD-R . . .

THEY'RE BOOTLEGS! The company putting them out is doing so illegally!

But I'll agree with you on one thing: Prince needs to be putting this stuff out himself!

boscho said:[quote]
Sabotage et al may have high prices but it's not really that much higher than what'reputable' record stores charge for official music. And then the music industry has the cheek to moan about a drop in sales figures!



Yes, but do not forget that bootlegers do not remunerate the artists, therefore I always felt that the price is way to high: big profit on a few copies sold, that's the policy...

matt said:

To paraphrase Oskar Schindler, "presentation is everything".


.

I recently bought the First Avenue show bootleg for almost $70.00 and personally I think its a great show. However most of the bootlegs in my collection are CDRs because they are cheaper. And for me that is the bottom line. My CDR boots come to me copied on high end CDRs and with professional scans of the CD liners and the CD cover. So for the price of me purchasing First AVenue for $70.00 I could have purchased 4 CDR copies of the same show. Like I said earlier price is the bottom line for me. The more boots I can get for my buck is the driving factor.


bootlegs

I just know things have come along way since the 80s early 90s when we would buy a double concert cd-set for 80 bucks and the quality was hot trash...And back then they didn't let U hear the cd first 2 peep the quality...talking about blind faith*

UsexyMF said:

AMEN,brother!!That hapened to me too many times!!

ian said:

Oh yes there is. Don't be surprised that if you take out a CDR from a couple of years back that it's partially unreadable. I've read several tests by magazines and they were often surprising and shocking: even freshly written big brand CDRs often contained numerous errors, which would only get worse over the years. Whereas regular CDs -- i.e. factory pressed ones -- don't have this degradation.

WildheartXXX said:

The reason their prices are higher (even though in my experience bootlegs aren't more expensive than regular CDs, and with some dealers even cheaper) have to do with them being not legit: the cost of pressing a limited run is far higher than that of regular CDs. Now add to that cosst of booklets, plus the costs of the source tapes, plus the limited stock, plus the absence of a professional worldwide distribution network, and then you get closer to why they're "more expensive" (even though I've only rarely seen expensive boots).

king bart has spoken...

giotto said:

If you're suggesting that CD's are better than CD-R's simply for the sake of appearance, well, you've got a point.

But remember folks, bootlegs are illegal. I'm not passing judgment of people who buy/sell/trade them, but the law is the law. Complaining that your bootleg is on a CD-R rather than a CD is sorta like complaining that your neighborhood cocaine dealer is selling his product in plastic bags from the grocery store instead of tamper-resistant pharmaceutical-grade bottles.

I love bootlegs, and I love all the response's to this post. Thanks-Phil

ian said:

There's not much wrong with CDR's (except Bart had a good point about the degrading of the quality). I trade CDR's a lot. No problem.
But Premium, they sell CDR's .They have a lot of discs that won't play in my CD-player in my computer. I expect 'official' bootleg-CD's to play everywhere. When I trade CDR's it's part of the 'risk'.

[edited terrible errors]
[This message was edited Thu Feb 13 7:35:24 PST 2003 by JeePee]

JeePee said:

Yeah i guess you have got the risk factor and the source and distibution costs. My point was having a CD professionally pressed costs very little. My friend had 1000 pressed last month and they are genuine presses and they cost him in the region of $1.50 a cd, perhaps a little less. He then had a a mini booklet/pull out poster thing done and that didn't cost a great deal more. Though it was more than the CD! We were talking $6 max for that package. I think that is what frustrates me when i see the prices of bootlegs. I know how much it costs to have a CD pressed with quality printed artwork and still the prices are enormous. Somewhere along the line someone is making a huge amount of money. Whether it be the people who supply the source tape, the people who distribute them or the bootleggers themselves i don't know.

Whatever!

Buy the CD-R and rip that junk into the mp3/shn world!

I don't care HOW much things cost, in the end they should be free.

Back in the day, I had a small group of people that would check out a boot cd/tape/album. Then we'd DUB it for each other FOR FREE. That's how that shit should be done.

"But without profits, bootleg companies will go out of business." Tough shit. Maybe I don't have access to outtakes anymore. Big deal. The best stuff has already come out, and nowadays, the material that is worthy is making it out via the club.

When I first heard "All My Dreams," I shat myself. When I first heard Small Club, I shat myself. But for every time I shat myself, I had dozens of assfaces.

Everybody knows it:

The outtakes come from assembled demo configurations usually produced IN HOUSE. That or from shiester engineers in a visited studio or whores who fucked Prince and the Band. You know what that means? Basicly, shit they came across or outright STOLE. That means that SOME PEOPLE HAVE CLEAR PERFECT QUALITY VERSIONS OF OUTTAKES AND SERVE EVERYBODY ELSE UP SHITTY, WATTERED DOWN COPIES.

Sell "Big Tall Wall" to bootleggers 3 times says "look at the new source material!" Then bootleggers sell one vrsion of "Good Man" 4 times, "cleaning up" the track each time. Meanwhile, they have a perfect version of Rebirth of the Flesh that they use pick up slutty "fams".

WHAT BULLSHIT!

That type of conspiracy is worse than the federalies!

WildheartXXX said:

Dude, pressing a bootleg costs WAY more. They can't do it on official presses, since most of them can be traced down to the owners. Hence most of the bootleg industry is located in Eastern Europe. But then there's still huge risks involved, and people who are part of this want to get paid good money to make it worth their while.

Ten years ago there were plenty of boots where you could see that they were pressed on a legal machine under a false name (when the label on the boot looks like it's a record by an amateur band for instance) but they cut down on that big time. Loopholes in German and Italian law also allowed for making bootlegs for a while, but that too got solved. Though there seems to be still a hole in Japanese law, hence the appearance of a lot of really expensive bootlegs from that area, which then get used as source for "local" releases (but if you're a collector, you want the original Japan release, mostly because it's hard to come by and also because it is the original source before some idiot thinks he needs to "upgrade" the recording by messing with volume levels etc.).

And while Eastern Europe (and the Far East and elsewhere) are still a mess when it comes to the record industry, they are starting to get a lot of hassle. And then we're only talking about pressing the CDs, but you also need to take into account transportation, distribution, etc.