Certain things are just meant to be bought on the street. It’s clear that the trade in certain mind-altering substances could never be truly at home anywhere but on the corners and in the back alleys of our nation’s cities. Particular types of food — hot dogs in New York, crêpes in Paris — are integral to the mythos of their urban homes. Incense, radical literature, and hand-crafted jewelry never seem as potent as when being hawked from a blanket spread on a sidewalk.

But music? Who needs the streets? You’ve got the chain stores, the Internet sites, the mom-and-pops . . . There are so many " legitimate " outlets for music that it hardly seems necessary to scavenge the streets, the bodegas, and the shady kiosks by the train station. Yet at those fringe outlets urban music continues to thrive. Indeed, in recent years the music industry has been listening closely to what the streets are saying, to what’s making the most noise on the black market. Some albums are available in bootleg form on New York’s Canal Street weeks before they hit the stores, thanks to illicitly obtained master tapes and a thirsty public.

Artists naturally complain that bootlegs compromise their own sales, and more than one hip-hop video has featured a scene of a bootlegger’s table getting tossed over and his product destroyed. When rumors began circulating that record executive Lance " Un " Rivera was responsible for leaking an advance copy of Jay-Z’s Vol. 3 — Life & Times of S. Carter (Roc-A-Fella/Def Jam) to bootleggers, he was stabbed at Q-Tip’s album-release party in New York, allegedly by Jigga himself (he will stand trial on those charges as early as next month).

Jay didn’t set a good example for his minions. Protégé Beanie Sigel faced similar problems with Cosmic Kev, a Philadelphia DJ who compiled a Best of Beanie Sigel mixtape and circulated it through the bootleg rounds. Kev had thought he was doing so with Beanie’s approval — new artists often encourage these types of compilations to generate and reinforce street buzz. Beanie apparently thought otherwise: he’s alleged to have assaulted Kev in a Philly nightclub.

But the consequences of bootlegging are rarely so dire. If you were lucky enough to grab an early version of recent albums by Snoop Dogg, Lil’ Kim, and Shyne on the streets, you’d now possess exclusive material (of dubious audio quality, it should be said) that never made the final cut (not to mention color-copied album covers that look like photos run through a kaleidoscope). Mobb Deep’s most recent effort, Murda Muzik (Columbia), was so widely bootlegged so long before its intended release that the group went into the studio and re-recorded an album that bore little resemblance to the original, a move that prompted the Source to review the album in three versions — two bootleg and one final. (The bootleg-review idea was cribbed from XXL, which went so far as to include an all-bootleg review section in one issue.)

Extensive bootlegging can also prompt labels to open up their vaults. Take Tupac Shakur, who left reams of unreleased material upon his death, in 1996, and whose cult of personality continues to sustain a rabid fan base. In 1997, the streets were flooded with " new " Tupac material released as the Makaveli series (this fueled rumors that his murder was a hoax); at last count Makaveli had at least six volumes to it. Interscope has responded with half a dozen posthumous Tupac releases.

Most often, though, the streets serve as salvation for artists who aren’t getting their proper due. For some, bootlegging is as good as it gets. 50 Cent was dropped from Columbia before his album ever saw the light of day (his name-calling anti-industry fusillade " How To Rob " didn’t help matters). But he lives on with the amusingly mistitled The Best of 50 Cents, which is available on the streets and thick with cuts from the lost album. When Queensbridge icon Cormega lost his first label deal, the streets became his primary listening station. Best of Cormega tapes are now hard to find, but its popularity paved the way for his recent signing to the Boston indie imprint Landspeed. Old-school icon Tragedy Khadafi was so frustrated by his label’s mishandling of one of his albums that, it’s reported, he leaked it to bootleggers himself: street demand soon caused the label to improve its distribution efforts. And AZ, who’d made a name for himself with a classic appearance on Nas’s " Life’s a Bitch, " was looking for a little resurrection when releasing his bootleg-only collection AZ Save Our Streets. The result? A new record deal, and another chance at the show.