What are your thoughts on bootlegs? There are some classic tracks and a few of my favorite recent tracks I’d like to remix, but I don’t have access to the stems for a proper remix (not possible) so there’s the option to do bootlegs. My question is whether bootlegs help in more underground techno or electronic music scenes as I tend to more often see a bootleg in the more mainstream genres. Does it help or hurt your career and image as an artist? What are the pros and cons? Any do’s and don’t or best practices? Thanks.
EDIT: Being a bootleg, I can’t sell it legally so I plan on only having them available as free downloads on my Soundcloud or Bandcamp.
Some of the most popular tracks I’ve heard at parties recently (or at least pre Feb/March when they were going on) were bootlegs. Some genres thrive in the bootleg department. Jersey/Baltimore club, UKG, footwork, juke, bounce,and, to some extent, Jungle and Rave/Hardcore wouldn’t be what they are without bootlegs. Really just depends on what you are taking and what you are adding to the original song, since if you are doing a techno bootleg of a revered techno track, you will have a harder time coming off as authentic, whereas if you are taking a heartfelt ballad and adding some big drums and ravey stabs under it you will have done more to move the original work into something that cannot be compared to itself imo.
There is always a risk when it comes to bootlegs. The other day one of my friends entire bandcamp page got taken down because of a copyright strike, while other friends much larger than them have been able to fly under the radar for a while with multiple bootlegs of big songs. Idk where you are based, but at least in the States the laws regarding fair use and punishment are changing constantly, so it really comes down to who is finding your music and how lucky you are in flying under the radar. You can go the full old-school method and put out digital white labels that cannot be traced back to your real identity, but that kind of defeats the career building part…
The only real worry I’d have if you are making bootlegs to make a name for yourself is that your audience might only stick around for more bootlegs and not for your “from scratch” compositions. I’m usually weary in putting out bootlegs under my own name, saving them for DJing to give me a few more unique tracks, or to just send to friends to skirt the copyright issue.
Even if you give it away for free, you are breaking the law. Assuming you are using samples that you didn’t get permission to use.
If you create a COVER, you can get a license very easily as it’s compulsory. But you can’t create a video with a cover song without getting a license from the publisher of the track. Which is unlikely to happen. Weird laws here in the USA.
For bootleg stuff, there is always the risk of getting sued. Back in the day, this was a little easier because you could press a few hundred records or make some tapes or even CD-Rs to distribute the song. There wasn’t much of a paper trail if you didn’t want one. Hence the whole white label culture.
like to make bootleg remixes for fun and I can play them in public too (one of them here: Heilung BNMC remix - YouTube ). Yes, it’s illegal but I’m okay with this. I would remove them if asked. I would never try to make money with them though, that’s beyond my morality.
I’ve made a bootleg of a classic techno track from about 20 years ago. I just used the vocal samples from it (found it on YouTube) and nothing else. I sampled from a different track a synth loop that sounds a bit like it could work in the original but it’s from a completely different artist. Then on top of that I added my own samples / parts. So there’s nothing in it from the original except part of the vocal samples.