“There are plenty more gems out there”: How to reissue a record in 8 steps with Mr Bongo

Step Three: Know the risks of releasing illegal reissues

Dave: The risks would probably be fairly minimal because you’re not making a lot of money necessarily, so if someone’s going to chase you for that they want to see that you’re making a lot of money out of it, unless they’re a real ball breaker.

Matt: We’re in quite a unique position where as a record label and publisher we can see it from both sides. So sometimes we’ll be policing our copyright if someone does a boot or uses it to sample. Then we’re on the other side as well where we’re releasing legit records, but we know all the tricks and what the process is and the effort it takes to take someone to court. A lot of time it’s not worth the effort, but then what you’ll find it goes to a certain point where it becomes financially viable and then you can get into big trouble.

Dave: Well that leads us to this baby, because the Paebiru album which is like the holy grail of Brazilian music. I didn’t know anything about it. A German friend of mine came to me and said “we’re suing this company in Germany because they’ve bootlegged this album” and he said “do you want to release it?” but I’d never heard of it because it’s super rare, I think 4,000 bucks or something crazy.

What happened is when they made it they all got destroyed in a flood and only about 20 or 30 copies got out alive. The guys in Germany booted it and Frank lives in Germany and is pretty hot on the litigation and got rung up by a Lula in Brazil, and he sued them and got a lot of money. He had chemotherapy that needed doing and that paid for his chemotherapy so there’s kind of a nice story there.

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