Cassettes were just so easy to reproduce back in the day unlike the vinyl records. It made it easy for us to make mixed tapes for party's or 2 of your favourite albums on one tape for a long car trip. However it also opened up the floodgates for the organised counterfeiters to move it and copy anything they could get there hands on.
My first experience with a pirated cassette was a trip when i was 10 to Hong Kong, Tapes were just so cheap and for good reason.... They were knock off's!!!! I came home with about 20 tapes and what I can remember was the labels/covers were never even, the sound was A) too loud B) too soft or the volume would drum out on one channel or out completely on both! They did not have a long shelf life because of the lack of quality!
My second encounter was at the Croydon Hills market in Melbourne Victoria in 86'/87', there was a stall that had over a thousand cassettes. mostly new titles and dirt cheap! I think it was like about $10 per tape or 4 for $8 each, 8 for $6 each, 10 for $5 each. The covers were really bad colour copies that you could never read the titles and the cassettes were clear with all the usual problems associated with the sound of poor copies..... I can remember the loud hiss in between songs! These types of stalls appeared across Melbourne markets like a plague until the authorities stepped in and made it harder to sell the pirated wears!
I can also remember the Unauthorised series of CDs and Tapes being sold in some stores and markets accross Australia during the late 80's, again until authorities cracked down. the Unauthorised series were basically bootleg concerts of bands from the 60's right through to the end of the 80's. The quality of the recordings were almost always audience made recordings although I have a couple that are soundboard recordings and really good sounding (The Who Live At Woodstock).
As I begin to catalogue my collection here, I have been finding it hard to find info relating to countries of origin because there is no easy info about these counterfeit labels without hours of internet searching. So I will continue to add info here under the 'Counterfeit Tapes' tab about brand names/labels as I find the information.
One thing interesting is the comparison I have made between alcohol bootleggers and cassette bootleggers. It would seem that a lot of labels begin as a bootleg label then become legit or semi legit after a period of time once they have made enough money to do so. This is similar with alcohol bootleggers in America.
Since the invention of the Compact Disc and MP3 format, most of us have forgotten there predecessor. The Compact Cassette. This is a place for me to keep track of my own collections, at the same time sharing them with you... There are no album download links offered, just images for you to compare against your own collection!
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