At first glance, the sticker on the LP might not seem weird. "Rediscover the sound of vinyl," it beckons, promising music pressed on a "serious 180g" disc, as if part of some coordinated reissue campaign. In some sense, it is. Keyhole Records is one of many companies finding a niche in the ongoing vinyl boom, and the label's albums can be purchased in record stores across the United States, ready to fill collectors' shelves with classic recordings. But Keyhole—who launched in 2012 with a Velvet Underground double LP—isn't in the reissue business, exactly. With a legal home on the half-Greek/half-Turkish island of Cyprus, Keyhole is one of a number of new labels that deal in unofficial product only—live tapes, radio sessions, outtakes—part of a new bootleg explosion that has taken several distinctly 21st century turns, stretching from record shop bins to the iTunes Store.
While bootlegs were mostly an American sport in the '60s and '70s, starting with the infamous Great White Wonder LP of basement tapes by Bob Dylan and the Band, and notorious labels like Trade Mark of Quality, Rubber Dubber, and more, they mostly became purview of Europeans in the '80s and '90s. Overseas, a series of legal loopholes (first in the Rome Convention of 1966) put unreleased music into the public domain so long as it was recorded abroad and labels paid all the proper mechanical royalties. Tested in the German Supreme Court, the practice grew more prevalent during the CD era. Despite a series of high-profile music industry crackdowns on American record stores (and a widespread non-commercial cassette-trading network), the import business only seemed to die a natural death in the United States with the arrival of file-sharing. "Once the Internet started offering downloads, mp3s, YouTube, etc., the market kind of fell apart," observes Joe Schwab, who opened St. Louis's Euclid Records in 1983 and has dabbled in "imports" only sparingly.
But the legal loopholes remain and, when the market for vinyl returned, so did the bootlegs. "They've never really gone away fully," contends Fabio Roberti, co-owner of Earwax Records in Williamsburg, Brooklyn since 1991, citing an older Nick Cave LP that passed through the store's used bin recently. But while Discogs reveals numerous one-off LPs and scattered CDs and CD-Rs in the "dead" period between the early '90s and the vinyl revival of the past half-decade or so, not even Radiohead seems to have warranted a bootleg LP until 2009. Checking "unofficial releases" sections of Discogs, one can see the shape of the illicit vinyl disappearance and return through the bootleg perennials who went away last and came back first: Pink Floyd (1990 to 2006), Bob Dylan (1992 to 2007), and the Beatles (1997 to 2007).
Even as official bootleg series swell by the season, the past three years has seen a mushrooming of the new vinyl grey market. During the past nine months alone, the European jazz and blues label Dolchess has shifted into more popular turf, launching a new imprint to issue nearly 20 titles (and counting) by Tom Waits, Talking Heads, Joy Division, Iggy Pop, Nirvana, and many more. Let Them Eat Vinyl has put out some 250 LPs since 2012, ranging from James Taylor to Marilyn Manson, with most shades of rock in between. Keyhole caters to slightly more alt-driven tastes, including titles by John Fahey, Captain Beefheart, Moby Grape, the Ramones, and others. Even artists who continue to fight bootleggers with their own live CDs and LPs—such as Pearl Jam, the Grateful Dead, and Frank Zappa—find themselves turning up on fresh illicit vinyl for the first time in decades. For Dylan fanatics, there are lavish box sets of the Europe '66 tour (five LPs plus a DVD) and the Supper Club '93 (six LPs). Following the marketplace, there is naturally even now a bootleg cassette label, with the appropriate name Das Boots, committed to the finest unauthorized small-batch jams by Richard Hell, Flipper, The Cramps, and other canonical punks. As always, some of the new bootlegs are by fans, made from love and perhaps even analog sources, and sound excellent. Many more don't.
As the Internet has burped up countless hours of previously unheard audio and created richly interlocked communities of live music traders on etree, Dimeadozen, and elsewhere, the underground LP industry has a nearly infinite supply of new material. Not all bootleggers are particularly discriminating, though. One recent compilation of early Lou Reed tracks features a newly-surfaced and excellent-sounding 1965 "Heroin" demo whose only source remains a cell-phone video made when Laurie Anderson played the recording at a memorial for Lou Reed at the Apollo Theater, the tell-tale hum of the audience quietly audible on the LP. A new Pink Floyd bootleg from the Dark Side of the Moon tour comes from a recording lovingly remixed and traded on BitTorrent by Floyd fans, and sped-up slightly by bootleggers to meet the length requirements of vinyl.
One deeper 21st century plot twist is the thoroughness of the new products' distribution. Where bootlegs once materialized from the car trunks of very independent record distributors, or ordered from ads in the back pages of collectors' magazines, they now come through even more legitimate channels. Many make their way into stores by way of the same regional and national distributors that have handled American indie labels since long before the vinyl boom. Many can just be purchased new via Amazon. What's more, some grey market releases even now appear on the iTunes Store, such as a selection of Velvet Underground audience recordings from 1968 and 1969, paired with titles and cover art first connected to a wave of Japanese bootleg CDs in the late '90s. The British company Start Entertainments Limited did not return a call or an email regarding their stewardship of the recordings, which include what were once highly-sought tapes by Velvet Underground fanatic (and Cleveland punk pioneer) Jaime Klimek.
While imported bootleg LPs would seem to remain the domain of the fetishist, and a somewhat necessarily limited market, availability in the iTunes Store suggests a whole new level, perhaps even in violation of the "import" loopholes, which should (theoretically) isolate the recordings in the European versions of the iTunes Store. One common clause of all the grey market labels, which operate under varying degrees of legality in their countries of origin, is that they all must pay royalties to the nearest local rights society. The Cyrus-based Keyhole, for example, promises that they deposit all appropriate funds with AEPI, the Hellenic Society for the Protection of Intellectual Property, based in Athens. Theoretically, the appropriate royalties on a Velvet Underground grey market release will make their way back to Lou Reed's publishing company, though it is hard to determine how it might stack up against current profits from Spotify.
"You're making an assumption that they don't have the rights," notes Clinton Heylin, author of Bootleg: The Secret History of the Other Recording Industry, the nearly definitive 1994 book on the subject. "It's a grey area only in the sense that one has to have sight of the original recording contract before one can make a judgment about whether something is an authorized release." In the case of fan recordings, European rights law grows murky and murkier. "These radio broadcasts and recordings that have slipped into the public domain, they're not really bootlegs," Heylin continues, "they're protection gap releases. There are real bootlegs, too"—recordings whose master recordings are unequivocally owned by labels or artists—"and a lot of the real bootlegs are coming out in an increasing amount on vinyl."
In the 21st century, many of the rules of the music business have changed, but shady practices run eternal and deep. "The level of piracy has remained static, but the choices the bootleggers make changes," argues Rob Sevier, co-founder of Chicago's Numero Group and a longtime collector. "There's always been significant piracy. It's always dictated by what the market is. Fifteen years ago, bootlegs were largely geared towards DJs, that was the strongest market, until Serato came along," he says, recalling a particular illicit Gang Starr pressing. "Now the strongest market is the dilettante record buyer," he says. Outright piracy, too, continues in the vinyl revival, with some reissue labels finding it better to press vinyl first and answer legal queries later. In all cases, the companies are taking gambles that no one will come asking questions. "It's purely just a hole in the market place," Sevier says of the availability of live recordings on iTunes. "It's like printing pennies. You can print enough pennies and you've got enough for lunch."
At nearly every level of grey market vinyl, the product remains difficult to evaluate from a legal point-of-view, so small scale as to make it impossible (or worth it) to control. "You go after whoever you can find," says Richard Grabel, a veteran music industry lawyer for Sonic Youth and others, who sends cease-and-desists to vendors when he finds them selling bootlegs. But with the labels themselves hiding out in Europe (none responded to interview queries), the source of the vinyl itself will continue to remain obscured. But collectors' fondness for illicit thrills and deep cuts rings loud and clear in old-fashioned analog fidelity.