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Maria's Guide to Detecting Bootlegs Print E-mail
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Written by Maria   
Wednesday, 25 June 2008 04:07
Bootlegs. I hate them, you hate them, we've all been burned by them at least once. It's time to put a stop to this once and for all, Revolutionaries. Here I've assembled a guide here on how you can protect yourself from unwittingly buying counterfeit merchandise.
Remember, friends don't let friends buy bootlegs!

Maria's Checklist of Legitimacy ...for Great Justice

Ask yourself these questions before you hit "buy" on Ebay—
1) Have I even heard of this release? Is it on the band's official discography?
2) Does the cover art on the item listing match the official cover art?
3) Does the album have the artist's record label on it (and, if possible, fanclub name)?
4) Is this a power seller, a legitimate online business or someone selling their used goods?
5) Where is this seller located? Are they in Japan or are they in a location that tends to be a hotbed of counterfeit goods (like Hong Kong)?
6) Are there clear, large images of the goods for sale on the listing?

Do your research, always check out the official discography of the band before you buy something. Every band has an official website, and every official band website has a discography section. Familiarize yourself with what the CD looks like—check the official tracklist too. Some bootlegs will have totally different art (ripped from a magazine or photoshoot) and in most cases the tracklistings might be a bit off, with extra tracks tacked onto the end.

Watch out for big offenders like Miya and Ever-Anime. They are out and out bootleggers. Never buy anything they have released as it is always a bootleg!

Here's one really nasty bootleg that combines a few of the above points into one HANDY EXAMPLE:
Bootleg Malice Mizer back cover

This is the back cover of a very, very bootleg album. There are a number of huge RED FLAGS on this. Can you spot them all?

Pencils down, students!
Let's see if you got them all (excuse me as I go all Perez Hilton on this image):
Bootleg Malice Mizer back cover explained
Roman Numerals I and II
There are TWO SEPERATE TRACKLISTINGS on this ONE CD!  Now, that certainly can't be right!
Penalty: -2

Presence of Ever Anime "label"
Buu-buu! They are a known bootlegger.
Penalty: -Gazillion

Underlined goodies
The text is rife with typos. Produeer? Reprouced? Arrenge?
Penalty: -1

Back cover "art"
It might be hard to tell online, but if you see this art in person the print quality is quite low and grainy. This doesn't fly on a professional album release!
Penalty: -1

TOTAL PENALTY: Negative gazillion and four. CONCLUSION: BOOTLEG


In case this wasn't enough evidence for you, let's turn over the album and take a gander at the front cover.  Here's the front cover of the bootleg:
Bootleg CD cover
Anyone who has done some really quick research on the Malice Mizer discography would be able to tell that this is bootleg immediately. Why?  Because there IS NO SUCH album called "Memoire + Voyage sans retour." There is one album called "Memoire," and another called "Voyage sans retour." This bootleg smooshes the two albums onto one disc and slapped a totally unrelated image onto the cover.  (Also note the text bleeding over the left edge, which just looks bad. Another bootleg giveaway.)

This is what the actual "Voyage sans retour" album cover looks like (which again is easy to find out if you take a few moments to check out the band discography online):

All it takes is some quick research, folks!

And now, back to the pointers!

Be careful around power sellers. Just because they're selling more doesn't make it more legit.  Smaller ebayers are usually fans selling used wares, but some people make tidy profits passing off bootleg albums as the real deal (or worse, as some RARE version of the real deal). 

Be wary of "RARE" claims.  Most skeezy sellers on ebay slap "rare!!11111" on their listings to grab more views, and these items are almost never actually rare.  Chances are if you've never heard of it and it's sending up all sorts of red flags, you haven't run across the Holy Grail, you've found a fake.  Same goes for special packaged deals. Bootleggers try to sweeten the deal with all kinds of lures, but their wares are still totally fake.

Sketchy photos usually mean sketchy goods. Any decent seller will take closeups of their goods so you can see that it's real.  People trying to scam you will take a blurry, tiny photo and hope you're an optimist.  Don't let them fool you! Insist on seeing what they're selling closeup enough that you can verify important cues, like the presence of the record label!

Time for another example:


Certainly the tracklisting looks legitimate enough (to a die-hard Gackt fan anyway), but there are two MAJOR RED FLAGS on this as well. See them? 

Here:

1) There's no record label on this at all! What, did this just fall out of the sky?  As this is a Gackt release, there should be a mention of Nippon Crown, his label, at the very least. But nope, nowhere to be found.

2) It's a VCD. For those that don't know, VCDs are kind of the cheap cousin to DVDs -- they are region free and very popular in China. They are also the favored video formate for bootleggers because they are much easier and faster to duplicate. There isn't a single legitimate video release in Japan that has ever come out on VCD.  So if the video you're eyeing is a VCD I can guarantee you that it's counterfeit.

Back to the list again --
Presentation really matters, and no record company would want to release an album that wasn't presented in the best possible way. That means every last detail has been attended to, so if the fonts are all funky and things just don't look neat at a casual glance, chances are it's a bad knockoff.  Bootleggers are getting better about fooling people with more professional-looking counterfeits, but most of the time their end product just won't look nearly as nice as the real thing!

Case in point, here's the back cover of a particularly horrible knockoff:

Hopefully if you saw this online you'd be able to tell this was fake. Can you even READ the tracklist there? The grey text is way too subdued against the very noisy background.  This is barely legible let alone professional.  Really poor presentation like this is the hallmark of bootlegs.

Always look for the record label. It will always be there as long as the release is legitimate. On albums you can usually find it on the bottom of the back cover, though sometimes artists get creative and move it around. But it's still there somewhere. Find it. If you don't see it, it ain't real.

Though the pink text is hard to read, you can still see the record label information on this copy of hide's "Ja, Zoo" on the lower right.


Rules of thumb to remember if this is all a bit too complex for you:

1) Ebay sellers located Japan are usually trustworthy. Stores like CDJapan, HMV, YesAsia and AmazonJP are always trustworthy.
2) Never ever buy anything distributed by Miya or Ever Anime.
3) Anime shops online often sell bootlegs. Not always, but often. Avoid them.
4) While there are many legitimate and honest sellers from Hong Kong and Taiwan, power sellers from these locations are usually hawking bootlegs. Be careful when buying from power sellers in these locations.
5) If the price seems way too low, that's because it's probably a bootleg.
6) If you've never heard of the item for sale and it's not on the band's official discography online, it's definitely a bootleg.
7) If it looks kind of ghetto and unprofessional, it's most certainly a bootleg.

and finally...

8) LISTEN TO YOUR GUT! If you even have to ask if an item is real or not, that's a good sign that it's fake!



Before you go, two final notes.

ONE: I have to mention that some people say anything you buy from Hong Kong and Taiwan are illegal. This simply isn't true.  Many major labels have completely legal versions of their bigger releases specifically made for distribution in Taiwan and Hong Kong.  When buying these CDs online they are often called the "international versions" of an album. Big names in the Jrock scene like Gackt and Miyavi are all available legally for domestic purchase in Hong Kong and Taiwan -- at a lower price than what you'll pay in Japan, it's true. 

The same rules for international releases apply as mentioned above -- always look for the record label, etc. They will be there.  And what we call "international versions" of Japanese releases will ALWAYS have a notice that reads something like this:

I bought this Ken Hirai CD at a HMV in Hong Kong. shh yea i like ken hirai, wanna fight about it?

TWO: If the CD is shrinkwrapped in the kind of stretchy, thin plastic that you usually see covering packaged meats, it's definitely not legit. Generally Japanese CDs come in resealable packages made from a thicker plastic that doesn't have any give to it. Sealed CDs from japan will often have a promotional sticker on the plastic as well -- look for them on sealed items.  This can be hard to describe if you've never bought a wrapped release from Japan before, therefore it's a hard call to make, but if you know what I'm talking about, great.

THE END!

—this bootleg guide was painstakingly assembled by Maria, who scanned her own collection of bad bootlegs that people have given her over the years. Please don't copy or replicate this information anywhere else. Thank you.