Pirate CD Sales Still Plague Music Industry

Pirate CDs (Reuters Photo)

Even in the digital era there are plenty of music fans who still buy old-fashioned compact discs for more than $10 a pop. But, reports The Wall Street Journal,  the money that shoppers have been spending on CDs lately hasn’t necessarily been going to the artists and record labels who created the music.

In the latest challenge for the battered music industry, pirates are flooding Amazon.com Inc. and other online retailers with counterfeit CDs that often cost nearly as much as the official versions and increasingly are difficult to distinguish from the real goods.

Earlier this month, the American Association of Independent Music alerted its indie-label members about Chinese pirates who have been selling knockoff CDs on Amazon for slightly less than the cost of legitimate albums, bringing illicit copies to market within about two weeks of an album’s release date, and sometimes getting them featured in Amazon’s “buy box.”

Although CD sales accounted for only about 13% of revenue for record labels in the U.S. for the first half of 2016, they accounted for nearly 40% of global revenue for the $15 billion recorded music industry last year, and still make up the bulk of sales in top music markets including France, Germany and Japan, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry.

In late August, the Recording Industry Association of America launched a study to determine the severity of the problem.

Starting with Amazon due to its size, the record-label trade group’s investigators searched for music on the site in a range of categories, from new releases to greatest hits, and placed orders for the CDs that came up in the top search results for each type of album. Of a total of 194 CDs delivered, 44 turned out to be counterfeit—including 18 counterfeit CDs in orders that were fulfilled by Amazon itself, not third-party sellers.

Greatest-hits albums were the most likely to be fake, with 28 of the 36 greatest-hits collections in question proving illegitimate.

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