Bookmarks: Some stuff to read on the internet - Crime & Corruption

On Music Think Tank, NoneLikeJoshua offers a lengthy history of the music industry's murky past:

Record companies can change the figures for how many records are sold from an artist for certain unethical purposes. This is where the terms, clears and cleans, come into play. A clear is a record that does not show up on an artist’s audit record due to bootleg international shipping. Some labels will state a number less than the actual amount sold; the labels bootleg a master copy without a barcode and send the copies to countries that do not use a barcode system or track any sales equipment. Record sales then fall through, and do not show up on the artist’s audit (Avalon, 2006, 199). A clean is made when a company produces excess records that are able to be returned to the record company for cash with no questions asked. The record will be given to private vendors that do not pass the records to the retail store but are returned to the record label for a refund. This could be a form of embellishment by whoever in the record company is having these private vendors buy and take back the money for the records (Avalon, 2006, 200). Every artist should know that a company may become antagonistic towards any artist that exposes some kind of wrongful accounting; the artist should begin to wonder why this correlation arises from the record company at this point.