Science & Tech Quote by Burton Cummings

Cummings turns what used to be treated as theft into a backhanded badge of honor, and that flip is the whole move. He opens with strategic shrugging about a new album, a little smokescreen that signals he understands how fans now relate to music: not as a scheduled product drop, but as an always-on stream of moments. Then he pivots to the real point: bootlegging isn’t just inevitable, it’s useful. The “great live things” online aren’t merely leaks; they’re proof-of-life artifacts, capturing the version of a band that studio polish can flatten.

The subtext is a veteran’s negotiation with a collapsed gatekeeping system. For an artist who came up when labels, radio, and retail controlled circulation, “we’re encouraging bootlegging” is a deliberately cheeky surrender that doubles as reclamation. If you can’t control the pipeline, you can at least control the narrative: bootlegs become free marketing, community fuel, a way to stay culturally audible without pretending it’s still 1974.

There’s also a sly status test embedded in the last line. Bootlegging is framed as attention economics: being “worth stealing” means you still matter. That’s ego, sure, but it’s also realistic about fandom. People don’t trade grainy live recordings out of obligation; they do it because scarcity and intimacy are part of the thrill. Cummings isn’t romanticizing piracy so much as recognizing that, in the live-music economy, circulation equals relevance, and relevance is the only anti-aging serum rock stars actually get.