Aww, come on, isn't that a bit harsh? Everyone knows that the markup on retail CDs in itself is pretty criminal, and only those artists who've been in the business long enough to have decent contracts actually see any of those profits. Just for the sake of argument, suppose you liked, say, Neil Young's music enough to go see a really good cover band that billed itself as such. Would you begrudge the band for charging admission to the show? Sure, it's not the real thing, but it's not the end of the world or anything.

The quality of the actual recordings is another issue, though. Mp3s have to be downloaded at about 192 kbs (I think) to be CD quality, but of course, you can't expect bootleggers to be that finicky. Most people won't be able to detect a difference in quality of anything above about 162 kbs, anyway; I know this because I've loaded stuff onto my wife's mp3 player (not an iPod, I might add) and only later realized that it was in that vicinity.