Post your pirate CDs from Amazon

I guess you can call it a cautionary thread, as more than once I have bought CD's from Amazon and they turned out to be CD-Rs.

In my case they are pirated editions of the Complete Beethoven Edition from Deutsche Grammophon. The booklet was badly printed with text run-off and CD-Rs.

 

A good thread on it MR, Amazon does have a 'out of print' CDR service, the description should state as being so. But i'm sure especially when royalty free music is available some get through.
Did you report yours to Amazon or the label?
Anyone Bought Commercially Released CDs That Seem to BE CD-Rs? »

 

The made on demand titles which are burned by Amazon with printed artwork are sanctioned by the record labels. Each is expressly stated as being a CD-R, so the buyer has that information before placing an order. However, there are dishonest third party sellers which are shipping burned CD-Rs in place of actual titles listed as replicated CDs. Not sure if these sellers are keeping the original copies or if they're simply bootlegging titles. Through the years, I have received some very insulting and unbelievable "substitutes." For example, I received a hilarious disc which was nothing more than a home-burned CD-R with the artist and title written in permanent marker on the top label of the CD-R. Based on the customer feedback for the seller, numerous people were victimized by this seller's bait and switch tactic.

 

this, I'm sure, wasn't sanctioned. The box had no end cap to it .. just a hole cut in to it

 

Only a very limited number of big retailers are licensed to produce CD-Rs on demand. No mom and pop third party sellers are licensed to do this.

If a mom-and-pop third party seller sells you a CD-R, and it's not a title listed as being available as an on-demand CD-R at Amazon then it's 99.99% a bootleg/counterfeit.

 

The CD-R disclaimer is only displayed on the product page, not on any of the inline elements that display related albums. I've been burned that way, but Amazon gave me a refund.

 

I almost got burned buying the Waterboys' Dream Harder. I was just about to place the order when I saw the friendly notice "Hi there! This isn't a real CD." Ended up finding it for five bucks in the used bin a month later so I was happy.

I don't know if either one was a counterfeit, but I did receive two... weird CDs through them. The first was a discolored copy of AC/DC's Blow Up Your Video. Every CD in that series is a digipak where the booklet slides in from the top into a folder pocket, but this one just slid into the side like most digipaks. The cover had an ugly tint to it; Angus looked orange and the text, which should have been blue, was purple. Incidentally this is just the way that Columbia manufactures it; the Epic version (for some reason there are two manufacturers of the same thing) is fine. (Yes, the board hates those remasters... I like em.)

The second was a copy of Bowie's Ziggy Stardust that might have been a counterfeit. If Virgin Records has a plant in Argentina which translates its copyright info into Spanish, then it's an official copy, but I've never heard of anything like that before. Anyway, on the last page of the booklet, in the orange sparkly font from the cover, it proudly proclaimed "ZIGGY STARDUS". I've got a picture of it somewhere. The quality of the text leads me to believe that someone actually created a custom font for it... and then this particular pressing left off a letter. I got an English (and/or official) pressing and the error is not there.