Back in the early days of live NIRVANA trading, commercial unofficial CDs were the main source of live material for collectors. Concerts became synonymous with the titles of bootleg CDs that contained that show. The discs were expensive, because the stockists demanded a high risk premium owing to the dangers of being caught. Collectors were often prepared to pay the high prices, for the discs were often attractively packaged, and had no other option other than trading for inferior-sounding analog cassette copies.

Now we have entered the digital age, live enthusiasts no longer have to fork out large sums of money supporting criminal organizations - some of which are very dubious indeed. The trading community has worked very hard to track down the best quality recordings of each concert, and these are now almost always more complete and better sounding than those used to press the commercial CDs. Now that perfect digital copies can be made, there is no need to buy any bootlegs at all (unless you consider the inserts to be worth the inflated prices).

There are, however, a few commercial releases which are still either the most complete or best sounding source for certain concerts, and these are presented below. These are the only discs of any intrinsic worth (although live enthusiasts would probably be delighted with a CDR copy). This list is intended as a challenge to the trading community: let us find better quality recordings of all of the below, and strike off the commercial releases as we do so.