Hello, my friend was telling me about a record he found. He looked it up and found it was apparently only released by a record label, labeled as a tax scam label.
What is a tax scam label? Why did they pop up? Why were they created? What happened to them? Were they known about back at the time?
Thank you.
I'm not sure about the US but in the UK they had a 33% tax on all records sold locally and zero tax on exports. So sellers would travel across the border, get them marked for export, then sell them back home. Richard Branson did this which eventually made him build up virgin records to pay the fine.http://www.slate.com/articles/business/how_failure_breeds_success/2014/05/richard_branson_tax_fraud_how_a_youthful_indiscretion_helped_create_a_billionaire.html
Here's some background on the subject. But there are a lot of things that just don't add up about the idea: primarily the dubious value of bothering to create actual inventory as a way of making nonexistent expenses more believable.
Since nothing was written in the trade press (Billboard, Cash Box, Radio&Records) about the activities at the time, all we really have are a few scattered oral histories from less-than-reliable personalities.