Sean Patrick Cooper

Jamaican DJs, to prevent rival DJs from learning what hot new record they recently acquired and played, would scratch off the record label and rename the disc w/ something related to their DJ name or club:

By the time tunes came into Jamaica their original US release date was pretty much irrelevant. Their exclusivity was what was valuable, thus the most important piece of equipment for a sound man bringing in American records was a coin. Any coin, the edge of it being used to remove any information printed on the records’ labels. This needed to be done quickly, too, because industrial espionage, employee bribery and all manner of coercion would be brought into play to discover a disc’s identity, so thefewer people who knew a killer tune’s actual name the lower the likelihood of a rival getting hold of a copy. After all the label copy had been erased, it wasn’t uncommon for a newly anonymous tune to be renamed, usually with a title glorifying the sound man or sound system that was playing it—‘Count Smith Shuffle’, ‘Goodies’ Boogie’, ‘On Beat Street’, and so on (Bradley 2001: 16–17).

Via R. Osborne’s sharp “The Record and Its Label”