Daily Shame 1983: Three more teenagers accused of copying cassettes of their favourite pop stars have been arrested, as the music industry clamps down on illegal cassette sharing. The teenagers were all thought to have illegally borrowed copies of cassettes from friends at schools and “made copies” to listen to on their personal walkmans.

Cassette copying has grown in popularity since the invention of the portable music device, and is thought to be losing the record industry a staggering £100 a week. Since the start of the year, a total of fifty teenagers have been caught copying from cassette to cassette or from vinyl to cassette, and sharing their music illegally.

“Music piracy is rife”, said Rick Wankleman from Sony. “The number of people out there illegally copying cassettes is alarming. We even caught one young boy trying to copy from one cassette radio to another by putting them really close together. Can you imagine the amount of money that Michael Jackson is losing because kids are taping copies of ‘Bad’ and not buying them for £4 down at Our Price? They’ll cripple us!”

The music industry is worried at the growing popularity of the cassette, and the tumbling price of the “Walkman” which is encouraging people to copy even more music than before. A trend towards making “mix tapes” is causing concern at Hit Parade Records, whose Managing Director Davo Pongwee says “what’s wrong with the Now! collection? People think they can just copy music and make their own mix tapes – it’s going to bring the industry to its knees! One mix tape alone contains at least 10 examples of piracy. All of us will be on the bread line by 1984 at this rate.”

“Only last week, we had to arrest a teenage girl for putting a cassette recorder next to the television and recording Top of the Pops. She didn’t think she was doing anything wrong, but Bananarama are losing tens of pounds every week because of the likes of her. The poor girls will never be able to afford that mansion in Los Angeles at this rate. These illegal cassette copiers have to be stopped, and arresting them, and potentially cutting their hands off if Thatcher will allow it, is the only route we can take.”

The NME’s Baz “Bootleg” Onions is leading the campaign to free the cassette copiers from jail, saying “the freedom to exchange copies of Sinitta’s latest 12 inch is a basic human right, even though it’s Sinitta.”