“Making dubs”: Exploring the origins of music piracy
From dodgy cassettes sold at your local market to the complex network of Magnitizdat bootleggers smuggling rock and roll behind the Iron Curtain, music piracy has a history stretching back much further than the internet age.
It is easy to dismiss music piracy as a modern invention; the product of a cultural landscape in which consumers are unwilling to fork over their hard-earned wages to experience the fruits of music and artistry. Admittedly, the advent of the internet has certainly made it a lot easier for people to pirate music, what with the newfangled world of MP3 downloads, streaming services, and a million different ways to distribute music – either legally or otherwise. However, the roots of music piracy stretch back far beyond Tim Berners-Lee and, in fact, beyond popular music in its entirety.
Music piracy has its roots in copyright law, which itself can be traced back hundreds of years. During the 18th century, long before the world became entranced by pop music, the UK passed the Statute of Anne in 1710, and their trans-Atlantic cousins followed suit with the Copyright Act of 1790, during the early days of their newly-established society. Inevitably, both of those acts have since been replaced, rewritten, updated, and adapted over the years, but the core principles remain: the author of a piece of work should hold the copyright for said piece of work.
While there were surely cases of people who did not hold the copyright for a piece of 18th-century music publishing sheet music and shilling it in the back-alleys of Georgian England, music piracy didn’t truly hit its stride until the invention of the humble phonograph record during the latter stages of the Victorian era. All of a sudden, music was available on a physical medium, and one which was not wholly impossible for enterprising bootleggers to replicate.
As far back as the early 1900s, these bootleg phonographs were the ire of legitimate record labels and manufacturers. Although they never went as far as to press “Home Phonograph-making is Killing Music” warnings on the sleeves of wax cylinders, there was increasing pressure on governments from record companies to update copyright law.
As a 1905 edition of The Music Trade Review, published in a 2025 paper by Allan Sutton, observed, “Making dubs, that is, re-duplicating the disk records manufactured by the concerns who originated the masters, seems to be quite a business in itself, though not considered altogether reputable, and certainly not legitimate.” Looking at that quote, it could easily have come from the age of cassette tapes, CD-burns, or MP3 downloads, and each format fits in there neatly, in place of ‘disk records’.
Eventually, laws did change to accommodate those early record labels, but that didn’t necessarily stop pirates from continuing to bootleg records. Back in the countercultural age 1960s and 1970s, for instance, bootlegged live albums were big business across the global music scene; meanwhile, countless bootlegged reel-to-reel tapes of western rock and roll were being brought into the Soviet Union, all the while avoiding the watchful eye of the state.
Then, with the emergence of compact cassette tapes, CDs, and digital downloads, the means of piracy were placed firmly into the hands of ordinary people. From the days of Metallica’s prevailing foe, Napster, music piracy has become virtually unavoidable, but it has always had a presence within the musical realm.
Now, with more and more music fans questioning the credentials of streaming services and their ever-rising prices, it doesn’t look like music pirates will be out of a job anytime soon.
