Word: dakou
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...traffic. (BMG in New York would not comment for this article; EMI in London and Universal in Los Angeles declined repeated interview requests.) But it's clear this amorphous gray market is entrenched. The discontinued or surplus CDs, generally known as "cutouts" in the West, are in China called dakou (saw gash) because some albums have a telltale notch in the jewel box and sometimes on the disc itself. Many music buffs prefer them to pirated copies, because the prices are comparable, quality is first rate and the selection of hard-to-find foreign bands is better: choice Shantou selections...
...Abundant supply has fostered a cottage industry on the mainland. Inside a cluster of about 15 music shops at a popular Guangzhou mall, thousands of dakou albums are on offer. New shipments come in twice a week. "Competition is fierce, so we have to specialize," says a middle-aged shopkeeper dealing mainly in techno. A national subculture has sprouted, dubbed the Saw-Gash Generation. Dakou has its own fan and e-commerce websites, message boards and magazines-which review albums only available on the mainland as saw gash and even print helpful Chinese translations of lyrics and liner notes...
...years the de facto-source of foreign tunes in China was da-kou. "Before, the only way people knew foreign music was through books," says Ou Ning, a Guangzhou-based pop culturato whose 1999 book on Beijing bands was dedicated to the Saw-Gash Generation. "But with dakou, we could hear...
...Dakou has the potential to cause friction between labels and their musicians. In an effort to recover some of the costs of overproduction and marketing mistakes, the majority of labels dispose of surplus or discontinued albums by selling them to middlemen for less than $1 per disc, according to industry executives. In most cases, artists who would ordinarily be paid royalties for album sales get nothing once their work is destined for the bargain bin or scrap heap, says Donald Passman, author of All You Need To Know About the Music Business and attorney to major acts such as Mariah...
...Ultimately, dakou may become obsolete. The industry is slowly moving toward selling music over the Internet, which neutralizes the risk of making too many CDs by eliminating manufacturing altogether. As one record-company exec says, "In the very, very near future, we'll be digitizing our catalog, and we won't be deleting titles anymore." But as long as discs survive, it's business as usual for China's dakou dealers...
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