#712 1910 · Pathé Orient / 法商东方百代唱片公司 (E. Labansat, founder; Zhang Changfu, Chinese manager) · Music recording industry
Shanghai's record buyers couldn't tell a real opera star's voice from a fake one, so Pathé shipped proof with every disc
the problem
Rival labels sold records under famous opera stars' names that weren't actually sung by those stars, and buyers had no way to tell
background
Early 20th-century Shanghai's Chinese-opera record trade ran on a trust problem nobody had solved: a record's whole value was the famous performer's name printed on it, but a buyer standing in a shop had no way to verify the voice on a disc actually belonged to that star. The British firm Moutrie & Co exploited this directly, selling records under its 'Victor-imitation' brand (物克多) with the names of leading opera stars -- Sun Juxian, Tan Xinpei, Wang Xiaonong and others -- printed on discs that were often actually performed by lesser-known singers hired cheaply and passed off as the famous names, a practice contemporary accounts trace to comprador Xu Xiaolin's pursuit of margin.
Pathé Orient, the French-owned label E. Labansat had built up from a novelty street stall into Shanghai's leading record company, faced the same competitive pressure every other label in the segment did: match the fraud with cheaper fake-endorsement records of its own, or compete on price against sellers who didn't have to pay real stars at all.
what everyone would do
Match the competition -- sell cheaper fake-endorsement records too, or simply undercut Moutrie's prices -- the two moves available to any label competing in a market where nobody could verify a performer's name on a disc anyway, so genuine recordings cost more to produce than fraudulent ones with no guarantee buyers would pay the difference.
what they saw
The fraud wasn't really about singers, it was about the total absence of a way to verify a claim -- once Pathé realized buyers weren't rejecting authenticity, they simply had no way to detect its absence, the fix wasn't to out-market the fakes but to manufacture the one thing the entire fraudulent segment could never produce: checkable proof tied to a real, identifiable person.
the move
Pathé recorded only genuine performances by the named stars themselves, singing their own signature repertoire pieces, and then manufactured a specific, checkable proof of that authenticity as the product's core feature: every record shipped with a printed booklet carrying the performer's own photograph and a facsimile of a letter in the star's own hand confirming they had personally made the recording. A contemporary witness, Luo Liangsheng, described it directly: buyers of Pathé's Tan Xinpei records received a booklet printed with Tan's own photo and a letter in his hand, proving he had really sung it himself.
why it works
A printed photograph and a facsimile letter in the performer's own hand are cheap for the genuine article-holder to produce, because Pathé actually had the real star in the room to sign it, but essentially impossible for a fraud built on hiring an unknown singer to fake -- forging a specific, checkable artifact tied to a famous, recognizable person carries real reputational and legal risk a cheap-labor fraud model isn't built to absorb. Once one label demonstrated that authenticity could be verified at all, buyers who had previously had no way to tell genuine from fake gained one, and they used it -- shifting purchases toward the label that could prove its claim and away from the label whose entire margin depended on nobody checking.
the payoff
As Pathé's reputation for genuine, verifiable recordings rose, sales of Moutrie's Victor-imitation records fell sharply and Moutrie & Co took a serious commercial hit -- buyers who could now tell real from fake stopped buying what they couldn't verify. Pathé's authenticated star recordings, led by its 1909 Tan Xinpei releases, became the label's best-selling catalog for over a decade.
where it breaks
The fix depends on the genuine party actually holding exclusive access to the real, verifiable source -- a company without access to the actual stars couldn't manufacture this proof no matter how much it wanted to, so the strategy only works for whoever already has what the fraud is impersonating. It also requires buyers who will actually bother to check the proof and a proof genuinely hard to counterfeit; a market where checking is inconvenient, or where a competitor can cheaply forge the same signal (a printed photo alone, without the harder-to-fake handwritten element), erodes the advantage over time as fraud adapts to mimic the new signal instead of the old claim.
what came after
Pathé went on to open China's first record-pressing factory in Shanghai's Xujiahui district in 1917 and remained the dominant force in the Chinese recording industry through the 1920s, its authenticity-first reputation becoming the foundation the label built its catalog expansion on.
references
- [1]"百代"浮沉——近代上海百代唱片公司盛衰纪 [Pathé's Rise and Fall: A Chronicle of the Modern Shanghai Pathé Records Company]Institute of History, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences (Ge Tao), 2008ih.sass.org.cn
- [2]Sounds from the cityGlobal Times (Liao Fangzhou), 2014globaltimes.cn