A person charged with producing the biggest stash of counterfeit vinyl in UK historical past was sentenced on Monday to 3 years and 6 months in jail. Rehan Ahmed, 40, had been urgent unauthorized data for seven years earlier than police raided his Phoenix of Vinyl warehouse in 2024, the place authorities found a staggering 15,000 bootleg LPs spanning 108 totally different artists—together with albums by Taylor Swift, Drake, Rihanna, Dangerous Bunny, the Beatles, Ed Sheeran, and extra. Ahmed later pleaded responsible to 2 costs of breach of artists’ copyright, and buying and utilizing felony property.
In keeping with the Guardian, when police entered the power, they “discovered a squalid mess, with chemical compounds saved in fridges subsequent to cans of lager” together with LPs, receipts, and different paperwork “randomly scattered round.” Ahmed, who generated a complete of £2,743,000 (or $3,667,921.39) in counterfeit gross sales, had been issued a authorized stop and desist order in 2017 however continued printing the data regardless.
In a press release, Peter Ratcliffe, director of content material safety at BPI (British Phonographic Institute), stated, “With music on bodily codecs having fun with a resurgence, the market in counterfeit data has sadly additionally been rising as criminals money in on the expense of creators and followers. This doesn’t simply impression the authorized music economic system and everybody that works and invests in it — it additionally impacts each certainly one of us as residents who fall sufferer to different types of criminality that it funds.”
