Get your official 'bootleg' here!

For more than a century, concertgoers have gone to extraordinary lengths to record live music.

The world's first "bootlegger," Lionel Mapelson, was no exception: He preferred opera live and without a safety net. In 1901, the librarian of New York's Metropolitan Opera Company hauled a gramophone onto a catwalk 40-feet above the stage to make personal recordings of arias. Mapelson's primitive medium of wax grooves has since been replaced with microphones and tape, but modern-day bootleggers still undergo perilous adventures - chief among them, the risk of having unusually bulky underwear frisked by concert security - just to capture live souvenirs of shows.

All that is about to change.

In an initiative that would render bootlegging unnecessary, the country's largest concert promoter is set to make CD recordings of shows available to concertgoers within minutes of the last note. The project, dubbed "Instant Live," could encourage bands to tour more often because of the lucrative revenue possibilities.

But it is audiences who may register the most applause. Since a CD of a show is more likely to last longer than a T-shirt with a three-rinse life span, the initiative could create an appetite for live albums not seen since the era of "Frampton Comes Alive" and Cheap Trick's "Live at Budokan."

"It is almost an impulse buy," says Don Jorder, chair of the Music Business and Management Department at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. "You walk home with a memento of the concert. You had a great feeling coming out of it and, for $20, you can put it on again anytime you want."

Clear Channel, the media corporation behind Instant Live, has spent months testing its product in small clubs around Boston. This summer, it took its banks of CD burners to a few shows by The Allman Brothers Band. Now, in its largest experiment yet, an Instant Live crew is touring with moe., a five-piece jam band whose onstage improvisations can make a three-chorus song last as long as an episode of "The Simpsons." That makes each show unique, an ideal selling point for Instant Live.

At Boston's 2,800 seat Orpheum Theater, fliers advertising the initiative briefly distract the eye from faux-marble columns and a series of spray-painted candelabra that would make a "Trading Spaces" decorator blanch. It's not long before a large huddle forms near a table where tokens for the live CDs can be purchased in advance. Fifteen minutes before the show, the cash drawer is at least $4,300 heavier. But the revenue stream doesn't end here.

"We're taking roughly 1 out of every 4 shows and doing limited retail. Our partner is [New England music chain] Newbury Comics on this," says Steven Simon, the Clear Channel executive spearheading the project. "In addition, when the tour is over, we'll pick two prime shows or maybe do a compilation and go to retail broadly with that."

That business model makes some industry observers uncomfortable. "If Clear Channel is going to do that, they're moving closer and closer to becoming a record label," says Mr. Jorder.

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