1 Beating the Bootleggers: Fan Creativity, “Lossless” Audio Trading, and Commercial Opportunities Chris Anderton [Pre-publication version. Final version published as Chapter 8 of Michael D. Ayers (ed.) (2006) Cybersounds. Essays on Virtual Music Culture, pp.161-184. New York: Peter Lang Publishing] The popular recording industry has traditionally followed a mass-market productivist model that has treated music fans as passive, rather than active, consumers. As a result, there has been a failure to understand or meet the demands of fans for live and archive (unreleased studio) material, or an inability or unwillingness to satisfy them. As Neumann and Simpson (1997) have stated: Faced with the steady output of a commercial recording industry that sets the terms for manufacturing and marketing popular music to various demographic audiences, the practices of bootleg producers and collectors suggest the music industry does not account for all aspects of popular taste or the meanings popular music carries in people’s lives. (321) In the past, this shortfall of live concert recordings and archive material has been filled by a combination of commercial bootlegging and noncommercial trading. Commercial bootlegging is the profit-seeking reproduction and sale of unauthorized recordings of live performances, or of broadcasts made on radio, television, and the Internet; they may also include archive studio recordings. 1 Commercial bootlegs are generally a physical product such as a cassette, CD, or CDR. In contrast, noncommercial trading is the not-for-profit reproduction and distribution of recordings from those same sources through physical media or Internet connections. Trade associations such as the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) regard all such activities as forms of audio piracy, seeing them as a challenge to the commodification of popular music, and