Many moons ago, (1973 to be precise) I was introduced to the phenomenon of bootleg record releases. This came about when I met a guy in my college hall of residence who I will call Bob Dylan Fanatic.
Bob Dylan Fanatic had collected every burp, fart and squeak ever committed to vinyl (knowingly or unknowingly) by Bob Dylan. Unknowingly being the operative phrase in his case, since most of his Dylan record collection consisted of bootlegs. He proudly played me one of the bootlegs, which, in common with almost all bootlegs at the time, was a recording of a Bob Dylan concert. To be honest, the sound quality was so poor that I couldn't even convince myself that it was Dylan - it could have been just about anybody singing through what sounded like a couple of walls, several layers of curtains and a significant amount of electrical interference. However, Bob Dylan Fanatic clearly thought that all of this was wonderful.
It soon became apparent that Bob Dylan was the most bootlegged artist of the time, mainly because he had disappeared from public view after a motorcycle accident, which lent whatever music he was making (mostly unreleased) an air of great mystique, leading to the "Basement Tapes" being the Holy Grail of bootleg recordings.
Other artists were also being "bootlegged", most notably Led Zeppelin. However, Zeppelin's manager, the, er, somewhat robust Peter Grant, had taken to raiding record stores while on tour, smashing bootleg records, and intimidating record store owners into removing the records from sale (sort of a do-it-yourself cease-and-desist process without the involvement of those pesky courts of law).
Bootleg recordings are, by definition, an attempt to make money on the back of a musical artist without that artist obtaining any commercial or financial benefit. As a part-time musician, and somebody who knows how much effort goes into the creation, playing, recording and production of music, I regarded bootlegs as an unwelcome form of commercial exploitation.
The Internet, as usual, changed the rules of the game...the availability of digitally-encoded music (via the CD recording standard, plus other newer standards such as MP3), plus wider-bandwidth connections to the Internet, led to the appearance of file-sharing sites, the most notorious of which was Napster. Once I had found out about Napster, I was also not impressed. The service was basically being used by internet users to share commercially released music without having to pay for it. Neil Young also pointed out that not only were artists not gaining any royalties from music sharing on Napster, the sound quality was appalling, since most shared material used the MP3 encoding standard, which is a lossy compression algorithm.
The record industry was (and remains) culpable in the rise of services like Napster, by their inability to understand and accept that a new business model was required to address the Internet. Their collective lack of vision will be a subject of a future posting. However, this does not alter the fact that services like Napster were effectively functioning as a form of distributed larceny. Not only that, but the artists were being poorly served quality-wise.
However, all the time that the record industry was working to stamp out bootlegging, and later file-sharing (which, as many people observed, allowed us to watch the somewhat paradoxical spectacle of an industry suing some of its best customers), the Grateful Dead had backed into a somewhat different solution. They always allowed anybody in the audience to tape their concerts - indeed, the Dead actually allocated an area next to the mixing desk at many venues where tapers could set up their equipment.
The deal was simple: you could tape any concert, and trade it freely with other Deadheads, provided that no money changed hands. If money changed hands, this was bootlegging, and the Dead's management or record company would come after you (which they occasionally did to egregious offenders).
This model, according to John Perry Barlow, who wrote many Dead songs with Bob Weir, expanded the Dead's audience considerably. The live recordings were usually sonically inferior to official Grateful Dead releases, but had a curiosity and rarity value all of their own. In fact, the recordings probably served a useful purpose in disseminating the news about the Dead's live performance capabilities, since the Dead's song performance style never fitted the vinyl record age - they routinely stretched songs like "Dark Star" to 20 minutes and longer, which meant that a full performance would not even fit on one side of an album. Effectively, the Grateful Dead pioneered viral marketing many years before that term was appropriated to describe a number of newer marketing approaches, mostly based on the Internet.
This approach to allowing concert taping has been followed by other artists such as Phish, Leftover Salmon, Medeski Martin and Wood, and Kaki King.
In addition to commercial bootlegging, there has always been a significant level of activity amongst music fans who taped concerts either openly or (more commonly) surreptitiously, and traded those recordings amongst their fellow fans. The analog age limited circulation and replication (there is a limit to how many times you can copy a tape, or, indeed, the number of times that you can play the tape to create a next-generation copy) so this tended to limit the dissemination of those recordings.
The appearance of affordable digital music encoding hardware and software in the late 1990's solved the replication quality issue. What was needed was a new distribution model.
This occurred with the appearance of Torrent technology. Prior to torrents, music sharing involved mostly "snail mail" exchanges. Now, with torrent software, you can easily and inexpensively set up a sharing site supporting thousands of users. There are dozens of sharing sites on the internet, most of them free of charge.
At this point I must confess - I am a fan of torrent-based live music sites. Since music is primarily a "spoken" tradition of new musicians learning from older practitioners, this is best achieved by musicians playing with each other in a live setting. My favorite music styles involve improvisation, which almost by definition, is best captured in a live setting. I therefore have acquired a number of excellent live concert recordings by many of my favorite artists in the last 18 months. Many of these concert recordings were actually made off the soundboard, so the quality is excellent, almost on a par with commercially released music (in some cases the quality is better than commercially released recordings).
The ethical issue I wrestled with as I began to patronize these websites was: is this stealing from the musicians? I concluded that it is not, for two reasons. One reason is economic/legal, the other is philosophical.

1. The artists that I collect music by have never released official recordings of the concerts. (In passing it should be noted that there is a strong ethical value system at work in the live music sharing community - if an artist releases an official recording of a concert, circulation of the unofficial recordings is banned via most torrent sites). Since there is no official recording on sale, my possession of an unofficial recording deprives nobody of any revenue. This is especially true when (as is often the case) I already own all of the artist's officially-released output.
2. Playing music live is a process whereby artists liberate music for us (the audience) to hear. Once the genie is out of the bottle, it cannot be put back away again. It's like speaking - however much you might want to take back that unintended insult, you can't.

It is obvious that artists are not making as much use of concert recordings as they could. A few major artists (notably Pearl Jam and more recently, Peter Gabriel) have released all of the concerts from a tour as limited-edition CDs. The Grateful Dead themselves started the "Dick's Picks" series a few years ago, releasing their own recordings of entire concerts on limited-edition CD collections. This is an excellent marketing and customer service idea. Owning a CD containing the very notes that your favorite artist played that evening when you heard them in concert is the ultimate souvenir. The actual production costs are modest - mainly manufacturing and distribution. Most bands can easily set up a high-quality digital recording feed from their soundboard to a server PC equipped with multi-track recording software.
In the absence of artists taking this route and distributing live concert recordings, fans are taking matters into their own hands. The appearance and availability of high-quality miniature digital recording equipment in the last 5 years has led to an explosion of audience members recording live concerts. A fairly sophisticated digital recorder and mikes can be hidden in components inside a small space, allowing it to be smuggled in past venue security. These days, not only audio but video is being recorded. The fastest-growing category on music torrent sites right now is live DVD recordings of artists. In many cases, these recordings are available on torrent sites within a few days of the concert.
NOTE TO ARTISTS - That guy in the fourth row with the hat? He may have a stereo digital setup in that hat and you are being recorded at 16/44.1 KHz right now...Here is the question that you need to answer. Which would you rather have happen:
(a) a variable-quality audience recording (or multiple recordings) of your concert is circulated to a hardcore base of fans. You get $0 in revenues
(b) a professonally-recorded and mixed soundboard multitrack recording is circulated to fans and possibly other music buyers. You get $$$ in revenues

To me the answer seems intuitively obvious. Here's an example. I possess a copy of MAAP #6 - a 4-CD package of 2 Pat Metheny Group concerts recorded in the Summer of 1991. These are actually copies of rough mixes from the tour that somehow "escaped" into the public domain. There is an official album from the tour ("The Road To You"). However, none of the rough mixes are of versions of tracks that appeared on the official CD.
The rough mixes are not perfect - some are unbalanced, some have missing instrumental parts, dropouts etc. The Pat Metheny Group is also making no money from the circulation of these recordings. However, the genie is out of the bottle - the recordings are effectively in the public domain. The band is in the worst possible position - they get no revenue from the circulation of these recordings, and they have no control over the quality either.
If Pat Metheny were to go back to the original tapes, mix them properly and release both concerts as bargain-priced CD packages, I am sure that most of the fans who currently have the MAAP #6 package would buy them. Not only that, but other fans might also buy an "official release". This is a win:win for the artist. The concerts are already "in the can", there are no recording costs, just the mixdown and mastering costs.
Many artists will possibly object to releasing all of their concerts, on the grounds that nobody plays well all of the time. What if they played a concert and just sucked? What they need to understand is a fundamental reality. Once the notes are out there, they can be captured by any appropriate equipment. Sure you may have sucked that night, but would you rather have the opportunity to control a properly-mixed sucky concert release, instead of doing nothing and having no control over one or more poor-quality, unofficially distributed sucky concert releases?
You cannot eliminate the unofficial releases by releasing your official concert recording - diehard fans will still trade those recordings. However, you have the opportunity to "set the record straight" (pardon the pun) by issuing the best-quality recording possible so that your customers have the ability to hear the concert at as high a level of fidelity as possible. Believe me, your fans will thank you for it.
It is time for more artists to follow the Pearl Jam and Peter Gabriel approach of liberating their live performances on digital media. If artists want to continue to build goodwill and make money in the digital age, they need to embrace new delivery mechanisms and take the initiative away from record companies, who still seem to be mostly stuck in the taxidermy and embalming business rather than the business of enabling the distribution of music in a way that satisfies fans and ensures that artists get properly rewarded for their efforts.