Counterfeit Vinyl – Buyer Beware
And Plastic (CD)
As vinyl continues to grow in popularity, counterfeiters are out there trying to take your money. Don’t get taken in by that low cost vinyl, or CD, that looks just too good to be true….it often is!
With Black Friday just around the corner and Christmas shopping on everybodies mind we are all looking to make that dollar go further. There is a very strong rumor that Amazon and other large online sellers including eBay and AliExpress have and still are selling counterfeit vinyl and CD’s. In their defense this is not a deliberate ploy by these companies to make a quick buck as they do try to ensure that their vendors are selling genuine products. But checking to see if the millions of products that they sell are bonafide and genuine is a daunting undertaking, but I am NOT defending any of them.
Tommy Boy Records who is best known for launching the careers of De La Soul, Queen Latifah, Afrika Bambaataa recently claimed that Amazon was selling vinyl that the label has not even pressed to vinyl!
As reported by DJ Mag, the company president, Rosie Lopez, claimed at the Making Vinyl Conference in Los Angeles earlier this year: “Counterfeit is another issue altogether. Somehow records that Tommy Boy hasn’t pressed in – ever – are on sale on Amazon, that’s a little concerning.”
Amazon was previously reported as selling counterfeit CD’s in August 2019 when, according to details shared by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), roughly 25% of all CDs ‘fulfilled by Amazon’ were fake. As far back as 2016, the music industry has been pushing Amazon to deal with the increasing problem of counterfeit CDs, as a sample of 194 CDs bought on Amazon was revealed to contain 44 pirated CDs.
The 25% claim was made after RIAA placed a number of orders on Amazon, eBay, and other online marketplaces. 16% of the CDs bought from eBay and 11% bought from Amazon were found to be counterfeit. The latter figure is especially alarming, as it indicates that more than 1 out of 10 items shipped by Amazon itself are fake. The RIAA reported that “A recent sample purchase program found 11% of new CDs offered for sale on Amazon were counterfeit, and 16% of new CDs sold on eBay were counterfeit”.
Also, 100% of the CD box sets bought by the RIAA — 40 boxsets on eBay, 32 on AliExpress — were found to be counterfeit.
It therefore appears that some CD’s and vinyl bought on Amazon may not be genuine, even if your order has been “fulfilled by Amazon” or featured in Amazon’s “buy box”.
“Items ‘Fulfilled by Amazon’ are sold by a third-party seller, but dispatched to you from an Amazon Fulfilment Centre” Amazon explains on its site. Basically, Amazons’ Fulfilled program lets third-party sellers list their products on Amazon’s site, with Amazon simply taking a fee and handling shipping.
These reports seem to suggest that counterfeiters may have spotted an easy way to list their goods on these massive online providers platforms, leaving many retailers like Tommy Boy Records unlikely to catch fakes very quickly.
Amazon is trying to deal with this problem and has published a recent statement saying that it takes this issue very seriously and that it does its level best to counter any and all attempts to sell counterfeit goods on its site. “We take our responsibility seriously and have more than 5,000 employees worldwide that protect our store, customers, and selling partners from fraud and abuse.”
Despite streaming and downloads becoming the predominant listening formats, CD sales still accounted for around 40% of global music industry revenues last year. Plastic and Vinyl buyers are increasingly shopping online making the counterfeiters job a lot easier to sell their product.
The Wall Street Journal reported that pirated CDs are increasingly difficult to tell apart from the real thing, and often cost almost as much as the genuine release, making it more difficult for buyers to be put off by a price that is just “too good to be true”.
According to the RIAA figures, after CD sales peaked in 1999 with sales of 939 million units they have now declined to 52 million in 2018. In the same time period vinyl sales have risen from 2.9 million to 16.7 million units. Clearly downloads and “other” methods of obtaining music have become much more popular than owning the physical media.
Despite the recent vinyl resurgence, vinyl sales were still dwarfed by CD sales in 2018 by sales of 52 million units.
But with vinyl on target to outsell CDs for the first time since 1987 and a guaranteed increase in demand for physical media on Black Friday and over the holiday season, it seems likely that fakes will continue to be unwittingly dropped into online shopping carts.
Before you buy vinyl from anywhere, please check that the record was at some point pressed by the label in question.
See here for my reviews of GENUINE Vinyl & Plastic Music releases.
