Bootleg recordings arise from a multitude of sources, including radio and TV broadcast performances, live shows, studio outtakes and session tapes, alternate mixes, test discs, and home demos.
The largest single source of Beatles bootleg material is the set of Nagra audio tapes from the 1969 filming of the Get Back / Let It Be rehearsal and recording sessions.
"[3] Other notable bootlegs to appear in the early 1970s were Yellow Matter Custard, containing 14 BBC Radio performances from 1963, (originally these tracks were thought to be from the Decca audition of January 1962, and Lennon himself told McCartney about the album)[4] and Sweet Apple Trax, a two-volume four-disc collection of songs and jams from the Get Back rehearsal sessions first issued in 1974.
[7] During the cataloguing and review of the EMI archives in the early 1980s in preparation for the Sessions album and a multimedia show given at Abbey Road Studios, it is suspected that high quality copies of some of the material were surreptitiously made.
[5] This may have been the source for the Ultra Rare Trax CD series from Swingin' Pig that started appearing in 1988, which provided takes never previously bootlegged in clarity that rivalled official releases.
[8] The late 1980s also saw the emergence of Yellow Dog, a label specialising in Beatles studio outtakes, who released the CD series Unsurpassed Masters in quality similar to Ultra Rare Trax; Yellow Dog, like Swingin' Pig's parent company Perfect Beat, was registered in Luxembourg, which had the most liberal copyright laws among EU countries.
Starting in 1999, Silent Sea issued a series of CD-Rs, featuring recompiled studio outtakes with commercial-quality packaging and liner notes.
[20][21] Author Richie Unterberger noted that it is "now theoretically possible to assemble a complete collection of the circulating unreleased Beatles recordings without ever buying a bootleg.
Fourteen of the fifteen tracks appeared on a series of coloured vinyl singles with picture sleeves, released in 1978 on the Deccagone label through Strawberry Fields Forever, Joe Pope's fanzine.
Due to the questionable copyright status of these performances (recorded prior to the group's EMI contract), the Decca audition was commercially distributed in various configurations starting in 1981; some of these "grey market" albums omitted the three Lennon–McCartney songs.
[26] In addition to continued inclusion on bootlegs, a small US record label issued the songs on CD through mail order in 2007 as The Lost Decca Sessions, which it described as legal and licensed.
The liner notes for the initial release falsely implied that the recordings had been made in the spring of 1962, prior to the Beatles' EMI contract, on a night when Ringo Starr happened to be sitting in for Pete Best.
In commentary for a lawsuit to block the album's release, John Lennon wrote, "the sleeve note, apart from being inaccurate, seems to have been written with a court case in mind."
[29] Additional material from the Star-Club tapes has been bootlegged, including "Road Runner", "Money (That's What I Want)" (with Tony Sheridan singing lead), and a full version of "Red Hot", and alternate performances of several songs.
In 2004, Purple Chick released The Complete BBC Sessions Upgraded as a digital set of ten audio CDs plus one multimedia CD.
The first batch of songs to leak came from an in-house compilation cassette that contained "Leave My Kitten Alone", "One After 909" (from 1963), "If You've Got Trouble", "Christmas Time (Is Here Again)", "That Means a Lot", "Come and Get It", "Dig a Pony" (unedited version), and two medleys from the Get Back / Let It Be sessions: "Rip It Up / Shake, Rattle and Roll" and "Not Fade Away / Bo Diddley".
[34] Shortly before the album's scheduled 1985 release, it was vetoed by the surviving members of the band; but both audience recordings of the Abbey Road presentation and the leaked promos of Sessions became available to bootleggers.
Some of the Lennon demos available include "Bad to Me" (1963, given to Billy J. Kramer), "I'm in Love" (1963, given to The Fourmost [although some scholars date this as a late seventies piano rendition]), "If I Fell" (1964), and "Everyone Had A Hard Year" (1968, later incorporated into "I've Got a Feeling").
Lennon's home recordings of "Bad to Me" and "I'm in Love" were briefly released on iTunes in December 2013 in order to extend the copyright terms of the tracks.
[49] McCartney's demos include "One and One Is Two" (1964, eventually an uncharted single for The Strangers with Mike Shannon), "Step Inside Love" (1968, given to Cilla Black), "Spiritual Regeneration Song" from India, "Goodbye" (1969, given to Mary Hopkin), "Come and Get it" (1969, given to Badfinger), and early versions of "We Can Work It Out" (partially taped over by Lennon) and "Michelle".
This was the first version that leaked out and broadcast on multiple radio stations starting in September 1969, and formed the basis for the bootleg Kum Back that appeared near the end of 1969.
Around the same time, the bootleg label Unicorn started releasing the "Camera B" tapes, in other smaller CD series, such as Twelve Days at Twickenham.
However, as digital remastering was still in its infancy, many fans and audiophiles were disappointed with the sound quality of the official reissues, preferring the "warmth" of the vinyl releases.
Several bootleggers stepped in to fill this void by offering digital copies of their own needle drops of the entire Beatles catalogue, typically using premium vinyl pressings played and digitised with high-end audio equipment.
A considerable amount of additional never-circulated Beatles material is believed to exist, either in private possession or studio vaults, as mentioned in documents and recollections.
McCartney's uncirculated demos include "A World Without Love", "It's for You", "What Goes On", "Eleanor Rigby", "Etcetera" (a 1968 song intended for Marianne Faithfull), and "The Long and Winding Road".
However, a small portion of "World Without Love" made its public debut in January 2013 during a series of Peter Asher concerts and has subsequently appeared in full elsewhere.
One is "Carnival of Light", an improvised 14-minute vocal and sound collage that the Beatles created in early 1967 for an art festival; the recording was under consideration for Anthology, and McCartney has been an advocate for its release.
Anthology 3 included only a 4:38 edit of the 12:35 take 2 from that day's work on the song; asked why a longer version wasn't issued, George Martin explained: "I think it gets boring.
Several Lennon–McCartney titles were mentioned in a 1960 letter from McCartney, including "Looking Glass", "Years Roll Along", and "Keep Looking That Way", but there is no evidence that tapes were ever made of those songs during rehearsals from that era.