> so here's a question: was the pirating uniform? that is, did top 100 cds > get pirated at the same rate as say the top 20000 - the top 100?
i would say it was uniform -- all musical tastes were covered from obscure heavy metal to django reinhardt. pre-1990 there was a glut for any good quality music in the eastern bloc and people would buy and listen to anything. for example there was really no difference between the presentation of an official early album of the red hot chili peppers and a bootleg of a 1988 concert in front of thousand people. it all went, but i'm sure people brought more choice stuff to the west. from around 1986 onward people started pirating via huge casette-copy farms which were lower quality and were mostly for local market consumption, but once they figured out the big money was in CDs the big guys bought entire shop catalogues from the west en masse and brought them over for duplication. for all intents and purposes the big factory from the link above was a government operation. kids my age back then with a little bit of corel draw skills were put in sweatshops to take care of the cover art and off it went. people hopped on busses west or east 3-day vacations with sacks full of CDs.
