Wall, Raine & Smith/The Northern Soul Scene, 5. Acquiring Rights and Righting Wrongs?

Since the demand for elusive “sounds” built up in the late 1960s, there has been a history of legitimate reissues of rare soul music and a parallel bootleg scene that sprang up in the early 1970s. Time was when a reissue or bootleg would kill the demand for the particular recording, necessitating top DJs and their exclusive playlists having to champion new finds to keep their sets desirable. Bootlegging precluded the songwriters, label owners and artists of their dues and was/is a reasonably sure-fire way to a quick buck, providing that the particular market is known and understood. This chapter will consider the history and effects of bootlegging, examine how it was allowed to thrive over the years and explore the attitudes of the major labels, whose inaction and ignorance necessitated the bootlegged scene’s birth and longevity. In terms of musical economies, the relationship between the London music industry and the primarily northern UK based bootlegging will be also examined, including the successes of the companies who did things by-the-book and the personal reactions of the creative people affected by the co-existence of these two oppositional yet infinitely interconnected record economies.