Audio Tax!

 This was a big hoopla back in 1986. It all started when the judiciary subcommittee on Patents, Copyrights and Trademarks adopted a plan called S.1739 the Home Audio Recording Act. It was to impose a 5% royalty tax on tape recorders and a 25% royalty tax on dual bay tape recorders. They money was to go to the record industry. It was introduced by Senator Charles Mathias [R] of Baltimore, MD. You can see immediately who that bill is directed at: bootleggers, tape dubbers, and commercial duplication services. It also would impose a $1 tax on each individual blank tape cassette. (That last provision was struck down but the RIAA wanted it back. Aggrieved parties immediately included OTR collectors, retailers, audio technicians, radio groups, and manufacturers.

It was opposed by the ARRC (Audio Recording Rights Coalition) [now HRRC] among many others including then President Regan. It's members included 3M, Tandy, Maxell, GE, Sony and many other companies that either made tape or tape decks. Nobody wants to see a tax levied on their goods. Back then the record industry was claiming that they were losing 1.5 Billion per year to illegal taping. That's over 2 billion in today's dollars. But as we know the record biz has a penchant for dramatic overstatement. In more recent times they claimed losses around12.5 billion dollars. It was a number produced by math that usually elicits bursts of laughter when explained in a court of law. While their math is ludicrous, the notion that some loss occurs is inarguable then as it is now. In the book Bootleg! by Clinton Heylin, the author details the three primary debunking arguments the ARRC put forth. More here.

1. The majority of home tapers go on to purchase the album
2. 65% do so to program their own selections (mixtapes)
3. 51% of hoem recordings are made from albums the taper already owns.

Try to remember that this bill was drafted 5 years before the DAT was created and a decade before the CD-R. That this spat was over simple, noisy clunky, consumer-grade cassettes.In 1984 the sale of cassettes out paced that of the LP. Add to that thought that the Supreme Court had only ruled in 1984 that home taping was fair-use. The short version was that the RIAA was smarting from that loss was was trying to get what they wanted via a handout from the government.They didn't get it then, but later on in the Telecommunications Act of 1996 they got some of what they wanted anyway.

GEN SBD AUD FM

That last checkbox is about radio and the rest really is not. This is more about audio than radio but it's pertinent because the art of the analog bootleg is being lost. Old tapes are sometimes labeled and sometimes not, the same way that  ID3 tags are sometimes filled in, and sometimes not. But because it does not appear to be consistently explained elsewhere, today I will detail the most crucial abbreviations I commonly see on analog bootleg cassettes.

• SBD: A (SBD) labeled recording is a tape recorded directly from the outputs of the soundboard at a show.  These are usually the best that can be found as ancillary noise (ex. crowd noise) is as low as possible. These sometimes later find legitimate release.

• AUD: A tape labeled (AUD)  is recorded from the audience at a venue. These may also be noted as Front of Board (FOB) which is just am observation of improved vantage. the sound could still be good or bad. Modern recording devices do a better job of noise cancelling than the old analog ones. generally I'm not interested in an AUD tape unless it's a band I am obsessed with.

• FM: Radio Recordings made off of the radio are usually designated FM. With a good tuner, FM recordings can actually sound really clear. These are often even in true stereo, which many AUD recordings are not. But the downside is that some radio stations roll off their high frequencies, and the dynamic range is compressed. It can make the sound unnatural. This varies by format, and over time. The trend has been toward greater and greater compression. In modern FM bootlegs, the dynamic range can be severely compressed to the point of sounding distorted. These are undesirable, but so are those stations. There are AM bootleg recordings out there, but all the ones I have seen are recorded to acetates due to the changes in AM programming over time.

• GEN:  This designated which generation the recording belongs in . The master recording is #1. You will almost never find these as there is only one of them by definition. A second generation copy is the best that can be found typically. Because if digital recording, now all bootlegs can be identical to the original since dubbing is now lossless. If the master is compressed to MP3 from an original in a lossless format like FLAC, then effectively it is diminished to a 2nd generation copy. Though, analog dubbing was often much worse.