Entrepreneurial Tapists: Underground Music Reproduction and Distribution in the US and USSR, 1960s and 1970s

This chapter takes a participatory approach to the reproduction of live music performance by looking at the history of "bootleg" sound recordings in two formations during the 1960s and 1970s. The first builds on the history of how opera lovers, mostly in concert and sometimes in conflict with formal opera institutions and commercial recording companies, created their own community for reproduced live opera performances through surreptitious live recording, record producing, distributing, cataloging, trading, and collecting. I will relate these activities to the world of magnitizdat, the live music recordings in the USSR that were also reproduced and circulated through trusted networks. The aim of looking at both of these twentieth-century forms of music reproduction is to ask questions about how music listeners responded to perceived limitations of formal music industries by creating participatory networks that identified, reproduced, and circulated recorded music that corresponded to their preferences and ideas about authenticity, aesthetics, and direct experience before the internet age.