bdm hat geschrieben:
Okay. Just to avoid misunderstandings: it wasn't implied that you sold them as originals. 5 copies, that sounds negligible. I always wondered why this escalating culture of bootlegging cropped up in Memphis out of all places. Do you know if those responsible were confronted about their business, either legally or on the street level? I can't imagine that the artists/rightholders just swallowed all that shit.
Well there's a few things I could say about that. For one, the cassette era of the eighties rolled into the 90's much more predominantly in Memphis than in other cities.. and it lasted quite a bit longer than elsewhere. Memphis was a music city for generations, the talent was always here, however the means to release music commercially was in a failing state thru the 80s and that rolled into the 90s as well. The local famous record labels were out or order and not what they used to be by any means, and the 'independent release' was the only way to get music out. That being said there was a boom of independent services for people who wanted to get music sold, and small boom of new labels at the same time between the late 80s and early 90s. While this was going on, local artists who could afford to be basically robbed by these small-time pop-up businesses, just to get their music out there, would do so, but would get little to nothing to show for it afterwards. The underground hustle was to just do everything yourself, and I'm talking about all genres, rock, blues etc.. A lot of artists were just saying screw the music companies, we'll just produce our own music at the studio then press our own tapes at the local duplicator and sell them ourselves. This started a whole new business boom for duplication services. And on the hiphop side, with folks like Spanish Fly and BK and others moving towards wanting to get their music and mixes out of the club and into people's hands so they can enjoy them whenever, the early mixtape scene became a thing. There was no need for record deal. This at the same time started a side game of people just buying cheap duplicators and making copies of mixtapes and selling those for near nothing, or just giving them out. Ofcourse at that time, nobody really cared, it wasn't about money, it was just about getting mixes out and people being able to hear a local DJ in their stereo, then see them at the club etc.. Once the younger DJs started coming up in the clubs and seeing how their idols were doing their own thing on the side with cassettes, there was then a move from not just simply a DJ mixing and a rapper spitting live in the club rocking a show, but to actually produce beats and being able to record those raps on cassette. And being able to create music and capture music, so everyone could hear it. So there was two different games going on at the same time, there was the DJs-turn-producers -who were really pushing the cassette mixtape scene forward, and there was the professional artists pushing for radio play and professional production. So that's about when everyone started buying up home recording equipment. Some going all out with funding from different sources, you had Gangsta Pat doing everything himself, OTS pulling Eightball MJG, you had Ska-face Al Kapone, you had producers Slisce Tee, DJ Diz, Lil Pat, SMK.. all of which were underground and independent but recording professionally and working with proper distribution. The other side of the game was the local DJs, now recording music in their homes with basic equipment and mixing down 4track to master tapes, and then taking those to duplication for sales at local shops and on the street. So there was two sides to the underground music come-up: the cheaper way; however, you could get music out much quicker and to more people.. and and the much more expensive way, which wasn't guaranteed, took longer, and you had to put much more in money-wise to get the same results out locally. So pretty much everybody in the music game in Memphis was doing it the cheap way at one point and that's how it blew up here. If there wasn't such an embrace for the do-it-yourself hustle, there wouldn't have been so much music coming out of Memphis, because 95% of the talent there could not afford to go the proper routes in the music business. Not to mention all the content restrictions when doing so, labels were not about to blow money on material they could not play on the radio. When you're doing it all yourself, you can do whatever you want as far as content, and that's pretty obvious Memphis had no restrictions in the underground. Now when there's a demand for music, and it's sold out and no longer available, and the artist/producer is working on the next project.. that's where the bootleggers come in. You could buy a master duplicator and 4 or 5 slave units for cheap, daisy chain them all up, and run yourself hundreds of copies of cassettes all day if you wanted to. Then take em and flip em, and that's exactly what a few places did back then. Early on, it wasn't that big of an issue, people knew where the originals were sold and where the bootlegs were sold and what they looked like. And those places got called out big time, you've probably heard them straight up called out on tape. But it wasn't really about the money yet. When artists/producers started going towards actual distribution and record deals in the mid 90s, they were leaving the tape game behind. The move was to CDs if you were serious in the business, and national distribution. Everyone still at the bottom coming up was left behind and was still about the hustle. But like I was talking about in the Siccness forum, it's the bootlegging many years later down the line of earlier material that really began messing the whole thing up. Folks had no idea what was bootlegged then, and so on and so on. The tapes coming out from that period from underground, those artists were getting booted at the same time too. There wasn't money in the tape game for artists/producers round 96-99, and a big part of that was from bootlegging. But also because the tape scene was getting stretched out longer in Memphis. If you were and artist/group on label, lets say 36 mafia, you could give a shit about bootlegs of your old tapes at that point. Towards the the late 90s and early 00's, if you weren't on CD yet, it was pretty much a wrap for you as an artist, unless you had some sort of serious funding. And lets say Tommy Wright for example, struggling to get on par with the big names, him pushing tapes to fund with national distribution was a hustle too. He was pushing tapes everywhere, more than anyone else, and it really got him his name out regionally in the late 90s. But once nobody was dropping new material on tapes anymore, that triggered the a new early 2000 era of booting the old tapes again, with the interest in Memphis's unique sound and it's early material. So altogether, bootlegging was always a part of Memphis music, and honestly it's what really spread it's sound. There's so many artists and producers that would have never been heard of today if it wasn't for bootlegging. But that doesn't mean at the same time, bootlegging also completely poisoned the potential out of Memphis, and it is responsible for running a lot of real talent out of the game that weren't able to get ahead of it all. That's just how it goes. You had to know how to work the business in Memphis and get ontop of it all, bootlegging included, and those that didn't know how to do that (which was the large majority) were the ones that fell off. It's nothing like the music scene today, where anyone can make music and get it out to everyone in the best quality in seconds, obviously this was a whole different time. It's been a mess from the beginning though, and the internet has it played all out in the wrong way since now it's completely not about the music at all.
The shit that goes on today, as far as still bootlegging.... there's no excuse for any of that.
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