There are bootlegs and then there are bootlegs; this is why some bands (
The Grateful Dead,
The Black Crowes) allow audience recording.
Ripping a legal CD and distributing it in
mp3 files is on an ethical borderline at best (though I'll grant that it's probably the vast majority of "bootlegging" activity), but that has little to do with bootlegs of unreleased material. Bootlegs like that always cost more than legal releases -- often close to double -- and they almost invariably sound a lot less "user-friendly".
Nobody is buying these things instead of the legal records. Obsessives and fetishists buy bootlegs after they've got everything legal, and they want more. Normal people don't get off on listening to undoctored live recordings, nor to
rehearsal tapes with incomplete songs and whatnot. If there were any market for
rehearsal tapes, they'd be released above-board. If "live" albums are retroactively "fixed" with overdubs and "production", that's because most people would rather hear a slightly ragged studio album than an actual rock and roll band in its natural environment. In the absence of alcohol, noise, sweat, and a crowd, live rock and roll is an
acquired taste.
The only legal recording from
the Stooges'
hematemetic final years is the disastrously ill-produced
Raw Power Lp; if it weren't for bootlegs, we would be left guessing how much raw flesh that band really ate. The abortive post-
Raw Power material would never have been heard at all. (The Iggy "remix" version, by the way, is no great improvement over the Bowie mess; I've got bootlegs with pre-Bowie rough mixes that'll tear your head right off and
stomp on it). If something is available
only on a bootleg, what can you do? Not every band is as obliging as
Stereolab in releasing
rarities.
It's also a fact that some bootlegs are made from tapes sold illicitly by band members; for example, Grant Hart is said to have sold off a lot of
Husker Du tapes to fund his
heroin habit.