You would think that Apple would have been spurred on years ago, what with Dr. Ebbett's, Mirror Spock, Yellow Dog, and the countless other bootlegers out there. It's constantly surprised me that they seem to have quite a relaxed attitude regarding bootlegs.
Indeed. When I was a kid in the late seventies, bootlegs of the
Get Back acetates and the
Sweet Apple Trax series were no more difficult to find than Parlophone pressings of
Beatles For Sale. The trick was simply to keep an eye on the stores carrying them so you could snatch them up before the other guys. The record industry's interest in bootlegging has been sporadic at best in my experience, and I suspect that's because at bottom bootlegging is just too small a thing to affect them much. Only a few acts are really bootleg-able, and the material available is second rate anyway: rather than launch an all out assault on the bootleggers (who will only pop up again somewhere else later), the smarter approach is to do what Dylan and The Beatles did in the nineties and release the best bits officially.
There
have been occasional efforts to clamp down on bootlegging: a friend of mine who used to run a record store in Toronto told me that in the late nineties he was informed by one label rep that if he didn't stop stocking bootlegs in his used CD section at the back of the store he would be cut off from the label's new releases. The industry has also gone after specific bootleggers on occasion, too: Yellow Dog got busted a few years ago for their (ahem)
Day By Day series, but even there it's probably worth noting that the charges were for having stolen Nagra film rolls more than the bootleg series itself.
Bootlegs aren't like illegal downloads of commercially available music: the audience for them is very small and the material being bootlegged is hardly top quality. That's not a threat to anyone's profits; it's merely an expression of a fan's interest. They can't let it get out of hand of course; but it's hard to imagine how it
could get out of hand in this post-
Anthology era: how much demand can there really be for collections of off line control room monitor mixes?
As for the official recordings, whose releases are now being bettered by people like Dr Ebbetts and Mirror Spock, the answer is obvious, and the same one that prompted the
Anthology: Apple should put it out themselves.
Enjoy the Purple Chick series, Harihead; it's really quite marvelously well done; and don't forget the Lazy Tortoise titles as well: they're a sort of
audio verite history of The Beatles, made up of demos, interviews, and live tracks. All great fun.
