Aside from being used to refer to pirated material, such as DVDs from China or CDs from Mexico, "bootleg" has another accepted meaning among the music fan community. Specifically, it refers to the practice of smuggling
tape recorders into
concerts and recording the live shows. Even when these live recordings are specifically allowed by the bands in question and thus legitimate, by tradition they are still often referred to as "bootlegs," or "
boots."
Though the practice may not have originated with them, the practice of legitimate bootlegging is by now indelibly associated with The Grateful Dead, who made a practice of allowing fans to tape and trade their shows. Many acts, including Big Smith, Cowboy Junkies, Guster, Rusted Root, and Toad the Wet Sprocket, currently allow this sort of bootlegging. In its early days, Metallica also encouraged live taping and trading of its shows—which was part of why Metallica fans felt so betrayed when the Metallica/Napster controversy broke.
By now, the art of legitimate bootleg taping and trading has become quite high-tech, aided by the development of digital audio recorders, computer audio editing systems, and broadband Internet service. Fans record live shows via DAT or minidisc decks, often through a tap from the band's sound board or, in some cases, a separate mic system set up expressly for that purpose by the band's sound man. They mix them on their computers, and prepare them for upload using lossless compression that reduces the size by approximately 50% from WAV without sacrificing sound quality (concert traders insist on CD quality and eschew any lossy form of compression such as mp3). And then they upload them to FTP sites or burn CDs to send each other.
The main organization in support of trading these legitimate bootlegs is called etree.org. etree is collaborating with Brewster Kahle's Internet Archive at www.archive.org to make hundreds of bootleg concert recordings available, with the permission of the acts in question, to the general public via FTP and BitTorrent. For anyone interested in listening to these live shows, this is an excellent place to start.