The age of CD bootleg sleeves is mostly dead, but fascinating artifacts from its heyday remain. While ROIOs are nowadays distributed almost exclusively by mp3 or similar formats, some fans remain nostalgic for the work made by amateur designers and distributors over the span of a few short years, from 1998 to about 2004. Some folk, it turns out, still make CD artwork, and good ones at that.

Thousands of artists had fandoms who crafted loving tributes to the musicians in the form of bootleg CD artwork, as well as companies that looked to make a quick buck. As CD-Rs became common, the price of "for sale" boots dropped to about $10 apiece. If you were to find any these days, any store would probably just sell them the same as any other used album. Most stores, however, even the ones that used to sell boots, don't buy 'em from customers.

This is a fun-loving archive of bootleg images from illegitimate Roxy Music and Bryan Ferry albums that you were never supposed to buy. Some of them because they shouldn't have been sold in the first place and some of them because the fans who made the artwork did it to wrap around CDs that they were trading for love. The images are presented quasi-randomly and have a few thoughts provided by the mysterious Mr. Monopoly, who designed nearly two hundred bootleg sleeves for dozens of artists, sometimes on commission, sometimes out of love and sometimes out of boredom.

If you would like to contribute details on the existing sleeves, or provide more imagery for use here, it's probably not very hard at all to track the keeper of this blog down. Your information will be kept strictly confidential and used only to entertain, amuse and pay tribute to an incredibly fun hobby that no reasonable person should have been doing in the first place, and not at all anymore.

But wasn't it so damn fun at the time?!