Pearl Jam's June Jaunt Gets Royal Bootleg Treatment

Pearl Jam is touring (nowhere near Seattle) this month—they’re kicking off a 13-stop trip tonight in West Palm Beach, actually—and that means more official bootlegs of Pearl Jam shows.

Announced yesterday, the band will once again make their sets available via high-quality downloads—and on physical, “made-to-order” CDs. (Fans clamored for the latter option after the band’s last tour was released solely in intangible file format.) Even you crazy kids with Verizon V CAST phones will be able to access three songs from each show from your handset.

Per the press release:

Digital downloads of full Pearl Jam shows will be available for download two weeks after each concert in mp3 and FLAC formats. The price for the digital bootlegs will be $9.99 (mp3) and $14.99 (FLAC) per show.

The files will be free of DRM (Digital Rights Management) shackles, of course, so they can be played and shared here, there, and everywhere.

In addition to digital bootlegs, Pearl Jam is launching a new physical CD program for this tour. CDs will be manufactured according to customer demand and will ship within three weeks of each show date. CDs will be made-to-order using recycled material. The price for hard copy bootlegs is $16.99/show.

Pearl Jam will provide three (3) stand-out tracks per concert mixed in real-time … Following each show, Verizon Wireless will offer fans one (1) full-length track as a free mobile bootlegs download with two (2) additional tracks available for purchase. All three tracks will also be available for purchase as ringtones and ringback tones.

All of Pearl Jam’s bootlegs recordings will be professionally mixed in real-time at each show to create the mobile bootlegs. Pearl Jam’s recording engineer will mix the recordings on the Verizon Mobile Recording Studio Bus.

Corporate partnerships aside—and really, how could this be done without a little help?—the 2008 boot program is yet another nifty gift from Seattle’s biggest, best band to its biggest, most obsessive fans.

Pearl Jam photo from the band's official collection, courtesy of Vandenberg Communications.