U2 Elevation Tour - U2 doesn't lose sleep over bootlegs

from cancoe.ca By Paul Cantin / Senior Reporter, JAM! Showbiz The terror of online song-trading and bootlegging that has occurred in the wake of Napster is not something the members of U2 are losing any sleep over.

In fact, as long as fans aren't being exploited and bootleggers aren't raking in huge money from the practice, it's a part of the music business they've come to accept. Guitarist The Edge says that for a time, he even sought out bootlegs and has collected over 200 illicitly released U2 albums. "The bootleg thing is something you have to learn to live with. As long as people aren't profiteering on it, we have never really minded, to be honest," Edge told JAM! Music during a recent tour stop. (The tour, which has already played in Vancouver and Calgary, returns north of the border May 24 and 25 in Toronto and May 27 and 28 in Montreal, with more Canadian dates rumoured for the fall.) "As a record buyer, I've got a few, but I never went in for it in a big way. But the quality is generally pretty bad, and that is what we worry about, our fans getting ripped off. Anything that can prevent that ..." U2 has taken the sensible approach of making sure most of their recent tours have been commemorated with some kind of audio or visual souvenir, whether with the album and documentary "Rattle & Hum," or with the home videos documenting each subsequent tour. The Edge says plans for a similar souvenir of the current Elevation Tour have been sketched out, too, although nothing concrete has been decided. "I think we are going to film (shows), and I'm sure it will be a video cassette or DVD. I'm not sure I would go as far as Pearl Jam and release every single show," he says, referring to the Seattle band's decision to release "official bootlegs" from virtually every date of their European and American tours last year. "I know the Grateful Dead used to do that, and for the completely rabid fans it is probably a wonderful thing, but I can't see myself mixing that number of CDs. I would go completely crazy. "Also, every band is different, I suppose. Our shows do vary, but we don't go in for extremely long guitar solos or freeform things, which is probably what makes it worthwhile to release every show." The band's most controversial attempt at releasing an "official bootleg" was during the European leg of the "Love Town" tour in support of "Rattle & Hum." The group arranged for a radio broadcast of a show throughout Europe, then took out ads in major publications that included a cover and liner notes for the show, so fans could clip out the cover and create their own bootleg of the show, drawn from the broadcast. As much as fans may have been delighted with the plan, the music industry took a dimmer view of the practice. "I remember we got a letter from one of the music-publishing associations, and they said: 'This is an outrageously irresponsible because the only people this could possibly benefit is the fans!,'" he says with a laugh.