Yesterday, Billboard broke the story regarding Chance’s Acid Rap album being bootlegged and sold illegally across the world. In fact, the bootleg is selling so well that it’s now charting on the Billboard Hip-Hop & R&B charts. The problem is that no one knows who is behind the actual bootleg. A shady fake record label, MTC, is listed on the back of the physical album, but the address listed turns up no real address or company. Fishy, right?
The good news is that the Chicago Reader’s Leor Galil got on the case and investigated where this leak began. You can read his in-depth piece now, but the plot continues to thicken and fingers are being pointed each and every way.
I bought the Acid Rap CD from Amazon for $14.66 to see if it could lead me to MTC. The reverse side of the front cover is a blank page, the image on the CD is the same as the Acid Rap cover art, and the back cover crams all the track information into a space not quite big enough to fit it (for example, Peter Cottontale’s name is cut off at the end of the listing for “Cocoa Butter Kisses,” reading “Peter Cottont”). The back cover also includes a piracy warning (“All Rights Reserved Unauthorized Duplication Is A Violation Of Applicable Laws”) and the MTC logo, a yellow circle that includes the label’s full name and alleged address: Mixtape Coalition, 2234 Roark Rd., Denton, TX 77384. No such address appears to exist, at least according to Google Maps, nor does there appear to be a “Roark Road” in Denton (a brief search does turn up a “Roark Road” in Houston).
Fortunately the Acid Rap bootleg includes another piece of information—a UPC bar code, which contains a six-digit manufacturer-identification number. Using a UPC search available through GS1, I traced the Acid Rap bar code back to Music District Inc., a tiny label based in Houston.
According to Music District’s site, there are only a few artists on its roster, including a rapper named Twank (aka Twank Star), whose first Music District album, Twank Is Coming!, is available to download from CD Baby. The six-digit manufacturer ID included in the bar code on the CD Baby page for Twank Is Coming! matches the one on the back of MTC’s Acid Rap bootleg. That same manufacturer ID has been used for other MTC bootlegs sold through Barnes & Noble and eBay, including Gucci Mane’s I’m Up and a Lil Boosie compilation called The History of Boosie.
This is very interesting stuff. Click here to continue reading.