The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has raised the alarm and has invited the US government to update the list of markets known for counterfeiting. With the revival of vinyl, traditional record piracy has returned. The main countries in which counterfeit pieces are produced are, again according to the RIAA, Russia and China.
It is true, the association writes in a note addressed to the office of the United States Trade Representative, that today the majority of violations concern streaming, but in a market where “physical CD and vinyl media continue to generate considerable revenues for American record labels” there are important e-commerce platforms that sell counterfeit physical products. They are shipped directly from Russia and China or sold on some of the platforms most used by Western consumers. The managers of sites and apps do not necessarily know that they are buying and reselling pirated products.
Russian and Chinese vinyl can be found on sites like eBay or Amazon. According to RIAA, however, Vinted is the most used platform and efforts to remove counterfeit materials have been to no avail. «The platform is not taking significant action» against those who continue to sell pirated records, writes RIAA in the note reported in the latest issue of Record Collector. “E-commerce platforms should do more to prevent counterfeit products, manufactured and sold illegally from Russia and China, from entering the legal market.”
Counterfeit CDs and vinyl records “are high-quality products made to resemble the authentic ones” to the point of being indistinguishable to the untrained eye. All details are reproduced with care and the prints are made with high quality machinery.
In addition to the carefully pirated official records, there are box sets and collections created ad hoc such as a Taylor Swift greatest hits album on quadruple colored vinyl which was released in Russia. Finally, the renewed popularity of vinyl has led “pirates” to release albums officially released only via streaming on vinyl and/or CD for the first time ever.
