You know, I've spent years holding up Pearl Jam as my prime example of a fan-friendly band. They give their most-devoted fans the best seats in the house. They record specific songs for those fans' ears only. They release soundboard recordings of all but one of their shows in 2000 and allow their fans to distribute them via CD-R and MP3, so that fans don't have to resort to buying bootlegs.

But, this past week, they did something that I would never have expected out of my fan-friendliest band - the band that I've used for years as my perfect example of how bands should treat their fans.

They sent one of their biggest fans a cease-and-desist.

Now, I'm sure you're thinking, this guy must have blown it. He had to be selling bootlegs or letting kids download studio MP3's. He was profiteering off the band, right?

Nope. He ran a website that facilitated the trading of Pearl Jam concert recordings over the Internet, as referenced in the first paragraph of this Musing. Not only was he not making money, he was spending it to keep it running, with no intention of making anything back.

Before I go any further, let me give you some background.

Back in 1996, I held a videocamera in my hand for nearly three hours, taping a Pearl Jam concert. Don't ask me what I was thinking - I still don't know. At the time, though, the band hadn't really stated a position on videotaping (or audiotaping, for that matter), but didn't seem to mind so long as the taper knew that they were doing so at their own risk.

I can tell you from this experience that the single-most frustrating aspect (apart from actually holding a videocamera steady for three hours) was that it was physically impossible for me to be able to get this video into the hands of everyone who wanted it. I only owned one VCR, and each copy took three hours to copy off the original, so I could only make a bare handful of tapes.

This is how video trading was in those days. It was a rather elitist society back then - you pretty much had to have something to get something. (Believe me, I got quite a lot of great videos off that crappy one that I filmed.) It just wasn't possible for the general fan to participate, particularly since most video traders would only trade with you if you had two top-quality VCR's, gold-shielded connecting cords, and top-grade videotapes. Oh, and if your copy was more than fourth-generation? Forget it.

Intro the VCD. VCD was basically a low-grade DVD-style format that arrived in the middle 1990's prior to the development of DVD. It was largely ignored in the US, apart from the occasional movie release that you could buy in your local computer store. The quality wasn't great, and who wanted to watch a movie on their computer, when they could go into the other room and watch the same movie on a big screen with a VCR? (Keep in mind, this was long before people had 19-inch monitors and fancy stereo equipment hooked up to their computer, and laptops were just beginning to catch on.) In Asia, however, VCD flourished, mostly because it was easy and inexpensive for pirates to duplicate.

A few years later, some enterprising music fans discovered that they could convert their favorite concert videos to VCD and trade them on CD-R's. VCD quality wasn't perfect, but it was certainly better than that aforementioned fourth-generation video. And every copy looked the same - no generation loss. This meant that anyone with a CD-burner could trade videos with the best of them.

Pearl Jam's fanbase is rabid when it comes to concert recordings. And they took to this project with a fervor that you would be unlikely to find with nearly any other band. Over a two year period, a group of PJ fans scoured the Internet and the trading circles, hoping to find the lowest-generation copies and the best-sounding (usually DAT-sourced) audio recordings and unite them to make the best possible PJ concert VCD's. Their progress and commitment were shocking - not only did they find a large number of first- generation copies, they were even able track down a few tapers willing to submit master tapes to make direct-digital copies. And the resulting VCD's were top-notch.

This group united themselves under the banner of TVM - The Video Mission. Not only did they volunteer what had to be hundreds of hours of work into these VCD's, they organized FTP servers to allow people to download these discs for free, not to mention organizing trees to help get copies to those who didn't have access to high-speed Internet.

Now, every PJ fan had access to the same high-quality videos that previously only the luckiest few could hope to attain. And, in many cases, the new VCD's looked and sounded better than the second-generation VHS copies that I felt so blessed to have. Over two years, countless people downloaded and shared these videos, and basically destroyed the PJ illegal concert bootlegging industry. (Nobody wanted to pay for videos on Ebay that they could otherwise get for free.) And as openly as TVM was working, the band never batted an eyelash.

That was, until last week.

Now, there is one complication in this story. You see, in the spring of 2000 while in Australia, Eddie Vedder spent a drunken night in the studio with a few random musicians recording off-the-wall covers. The session was dubbed "The Birdman Sessions", and copies of the recordings were made for all of the participants.

[Edit: Apparently, the sessions were actually recorded in Miami at the studio of Sean "Birdman" Gould. As the story goes, Gould bumped into Eddie at a bar on South Beach and offered an open invitation to record.]

Copies of these tapes eventually leaked out amongst the Pearl Jam trading elite, and it stayed amongst those elite for quite a while. That was, until a couple of months ago, when fansite Five Horizons made one track available on their website. 5H was under the impression from the person who supplied the tape that they had permission to do so, but the "elite" claimed that wasn't the case. To most of the fanbase, it sounded like a case of the haves wanting to keep something out of the hands of the have-nots, and nothing more. 5H decided it was better not to anger the "elites", and the file was removed.

But the curious were curious, and many people downloaded said song before it was removed. Not long after, a copy of the full sessions (apparently not from 5H, but I've never heard the story on how it was transmitted) ended up in the hands of the guy who ran the TVM site. The same permission was given, so he made them available on his fansite, to the delight of the fanbase. The songs were goofy, fun, and seemlingly harmless. Additionally, a copy of a demo version of the Pearl Jam song "Light Years" was discovered and made available on the site, seemlingly with the same approval.

About a week later, a post appeared on Pearl Jam's official message board, apparently directly from the band, asking that all of the songs be removed from the site. They hadn't given permission for these songs to be transmitted, and were upset that they were being made public. The guy who ran TVM removed them immediately without question, and openly apologized for the situation. And, to all observers, that seemed like the end of it.

More than a month later (basically, this past week), TVM's owner received a cease-and-desist, demanding that he shut down TVM, his fansite, and any site he was involved in that facilitated the trading of MP3's, VCD's, or any other "copyrighted Pearl Jam recording", with a lawsuit on the way if he failed to comply. He was completely baffled and shocked. Assumptions were made by most of the fanbase: this had to be Sony (PJ's label), not the band themselves. The band would never act so ruthlessly; this was a major-label move, not the move of a band who's always acted like an indie band, who always made their requests directly to the fans. To this point, the band had stated publicly that their fans could trade concert recordings freely, without issue and without fear of prosecution - why were they now threatening lawsuits? And without any warning?

We hoped for the best - we got the worst. Within a few hours, it was official - the cease-and-desist came directly from the band's lawyers.

The news wasn't quite the absolute worst, however. When finally able to contact the correct people, the owner of TVM found out that the band specifically wanted to stop the transmission of The Birdman Sessions and VCD's. They reiterated (though not through any similar legal document) that they still supported the trade and transmission of concert audio recordings, so TVM's owner was allowed to keep his fansite running. But TVM was history.

Many in the fanbase credited the move as a strict enforcement of the band's "no video" policy, and that fans should have seen this coming. However, the band didn't establish their "no video" policy until their 1998 Yield tour. And it wasn't a "no video trading" policy; the policy stated simply that fans could not bring videocameras to shows, only handheld (not DAT) audio recorders. It did not make any reference to videos recorded before that date, nor to any videos recorded from TV specials and the like. So it clearly couldn't be as simple as just the "no video" policy.

Additionally, if it was a literal enforcement of the "no video" policy, then it should also cover the bulk of the circulating MP3's, since most of the circulating copies of pre-2000 shows are DAT-sourced, also blocked by the policy. But the band gave permission for those MP3's to continue being traded.

At this point, the fanbase is completely confused. PJ's taping policy is now self-contradictory: you can't bring a vid-cam, but it's seemingly okay to break the rules and bring a DAT (or MiniDisc, since that, too, breaks the "rules"). Which rules are okay to break, then?

Beyond that, now that these VCD's are no longer "approved" and more difficult to transmit, it reopens the door to video pirates who want to profit off of the Pearl Jam fanbase. Many fans are still going to want copies of these shows, and there are certainly going to be people out there willing to supply them - for a price.

On top of everything else, the band's stopping the trade of VCD's leaves many of their fans in a quandry. How are they supposed to feel about their now seemingly-unacceptable video collections? For fans who cherish watching the band perform their songs, doing so now carries the potential guilt of violating the band's unstated wishes. If that's a high-percentage of your fandom, where do you go?

For years, the fan policy was simple. I've heard it best stated to me by Greg Eklund of Everclear in reference to Everclear's wishes for their fans: "We don't care what our fans do so long as nobody makes any money." Keychains, posters, CD's, videos, t-shirts, whatever... so long as no one personally profits from it. The only other limitation was that it couldn't include officially- released recordings - everything else was fine. Many bands share the same policy, and are denoted in my book as the fan-friendliest bands. (Jimmy Eat World, for example, openly supports a fansite called Simple Discourse that freely distributes video and audio recordings of their shows.)

Such a fan policy works in two ways. First, it almost completely blocks illegal bootlegging. If fans can get it for free, they're not going to pay someone else for it. Second, it gives die-hard fans everything they could ever desire from and by their band. It's the indie band's biggest secret and, before now, Pearl Jam's strongest weapon - fans who seek out every recording they want will stay devoted to the band even if the industry does not. Fickle fans will walk away if you take too long between records or rehash your old stuff (read: Linkin Park's Reanimation). But Pearl Jam fans always seem happy, since they perpetually have something "new" to enjoy.

But the single-biggest disappointment in this endeavor has absolutely nothing to do with MP3's, VCD's, CD-R's, or any other physical media. It's that Pearl Jam resorted to the cease-and-desist to get whatever it was they wanted. Before now, a simple request through the grapevine was more than enough. But in this case, they didn't even try that method. They went straight for the jugular. Oasis resorted to sending cease-and-desists to their fansites, and subsequently earned a reputation as a fan-unfriendly band.

If that wasn't bad enough, PJ added salt to the wound by playing the next card in the major label band game - they put out an unrelated press release, ostensibly to give fans something good to talk about and cover up the bad news. If you read music news websites, you may have seen the news blip about the two song titles from Pearl Jam's new record. The announcement on their website was generic and laughably non-descriptive (one song "contains some recitation" - what the hell does that mean?), and belied the fact that anyone possessing the names of two songs from the record knows the names of all the songs on the record. There was no other good reason for that piece of news to come out on that day.

The other major disappointment in the aftermath has been the band's deafening silence on the matter. The last official word about any of this was the cease-and-desist. There hasn't been any reference to the matter anywhere else. A good portion of the fanbase is desperately seeking some kind of guidance - some kind of explanation as to what the band expects and why they sent the cease-and-desist. To this point, none of that has happened.

And what happens to trading? Trading policies are generally left to the fans, since most major labels frown on any kind of distribution of bootleg recordings. Even Everclear's statement was made verbally, not on paper, since they were barred by their label to make it "official". Now, Pearl Jam fans are left to decipher the band's stance by their actions, not their words. And, technically, the cease-and-desist prohibits the distribution of MP3's as well, not just VCD's. Without some kind of official policy, nobody knows for sure what the band wants.

It's gotten to the point that conspiracy theories are abounding. The upcoming album is Pearl Jam's last for Sony under their current contract, and the band is still deciding whether to renegotiate with Sony, move to another major, or jump to an indie. Some are conjecturing that the cease-and-desist was a move by the band to demonstrate to Sony and/or the other majors that they're not afraid to do what it takes to be a major label band. Another theory is that the move was a vindictive action taken by Eddie to punish the fanbase for violating his privacy by distributing those private recordings. But without direct answers, all people can do is guess.

Frankly, there's a voice in my head that wishes that TVM had fought the cease-and-desist. It certainly wouldn't have been a great PR move for the band to actually sue one of their biggest fans. And, if you get down to the dirt of copyright law, the band has modestly weak ground to stand on. Copyrights are only valid if they are enforced, and Pearl Jam has allowed for video and audio trading to take place right under their noses for a rather long time. (Heck, people used their official message board to trade video and audio - it can't get any more under their noses than that.)

I'm personally just disappointed. It's tough when your one role model in the industry fails you. I kept hoping that other bands could learn from their example. Everclear doesn't currently allow taping of any kind at their shows, but at least they haven't resorted to a cease-and-desist to stop someone from trading or sharing those stealth-recorded Everclear tapes. It's hard to put into words - Everclear is actually, in my mind, currently a fan-friendlier band than Pearl Jam. I never imagined that possible.

Clearly, Pearl Jam still does more for their fans in the way of tickets, fan club songs, etc. But this whole affair throws Pearl Jam's movements into question. Were they offering that stuff solely to please their fans? Or were they simply trying to reap more profit? It's hard to ignore the fact that they sold a million copies of those 2000 tour recordings (profit), the fan club discs cost $10 a year (profit), and selling tickets directly to fans means not having to pay Ticketmaster as big a cut (profit). Not once before this did I ever question their motives.

I really don't want to abandon this band. I can hardly imagine doing so, particularly given how long they've been in my life. But my Ten Club membership is past due, and now I'm actually hesitating to send it in.

I'm desperately waiting for my now-former fan-friendliest band to explain this away.