Identifying fakes

With cassette piracy being rampant in the 80s and 90s, fake tapes are occasional in war music, especially as a result of the hyperinflated economy in Yugoslavia at the time of the war.

Fake tapes (or 'Bootlegs') are somewhat of a mixed blessing for collectors. Obviously the authenticity of the material is destroyed, since the tape, j-card and labels are not genuine, but it is possible to get higher quality audio from a fake tape than a real one. Some duplication houses (where the albums were transferred from their masters onto cassettes to be sold in stores) had notoriously bad quality, with cheap tapes that are nearly impossible to find in good condition.

Fakes however, may have been recorded onto higher quality consumer tapes, meant for home recording. That means it's possible to have a fake tape that's effectively a 'snapshot' of an undegraded tape from the 90's. A bootleg could give you higher quality audio than an original version of the tape, especially if found today, as many of the originals have degraded.

To be clear, bootlegs are a gamble and can be wildly inconsistent, but a bootleg of a rare album is much better than not having the album at all.

This article will provide ways of identifying bootlegs, and will show what to look for if you believe a tape is fake.

Cover

Here you can see the distinct shine when held angled to a light

The easiest step in identifying a fake cassette is also the first thing you see, the cover.

The most obvious indicator of a fake tape is the colors of the printed J-card. Fake tapes will either have washed out and very pale colors or be extremely vibrant and bright. It's also possible that blacks and darker colors will have an odd sheen to them, that's different from the otherwise matte paper. In some cases, the color will be missing entirely and you'll get a black and white cover, or black with whatever odd color paper the cover was printed on.

On most genuine cassette covers, the paper will have a general sheen across the entire card, and won't have parts that look matte while others reflect light.

A lot of times, fine lines on fake tapes will appear blurry. This is easy to notice on letters and graphics, but can also affect the main cover photo. Blur on cards is easier to notice in person, because scanning nearly any J-card can introduce blur in some areas. If you notice blur on the J-card as you hold it, that's a sign of a fake tape.

Speaking of lines, you may also see odd and faded parallel lines that cut through the entire J-card, indicating it was printed on a badly calibrated inkjet printer.

On a macro, or even scanner level, the dots that make up the picture on a genuine J-card will look much different than the grainy, coherent texture of a card that was produced by an inkjet. The text and logos on real J-cards will often be much sharper than pictures, so if your letters don't look clear in your scanner, you may have a fake.

Since fake J-Cards were cut by hand most of the time, its not rare to see white edges of blank paper around the perimeter of the card. In some cases, this can make the card too big for the case, and will look crinkled or bent when inserted back into the case. There are also imperfect cuts, where the picture is cut at an odd angle, causing the graphics to stop short. Improper borders don't guarantee a tape is fake, but they are an additional feature to look for if you are already noticing some of the aforementioned signs.

The last obvious indicator is when the design of the cover changes. Some album covers did change between reissues of the same album, but it was a fairly rare practice outside of releases by other labels or additions of singer logos. Another dead giveaway in this regard is when the back off a J-card is completely blank with no text. No genuine albums have been found without text on the back of their J-cards.

A fake Zbogom oružje. Notice the very vibrant colors, blurry image and excess white at the edges