‘I was the Spotify of the 1980s!’ The Italian pirate mixtape empire that brought pop to the people

Started from an illegal market stall, Mixed By Erry became Italy’s third biggest record label – until police cracked down. A new film asks whether the founders were heroes or criminals

In 90s Italy, the ultimate seal of approval on a tape wasn’t that of a cutting-edge record label or a stickered quote from a tastemaker publication: it was the varsity-style, hand-printed banner that read “Mixed by Erry”. It adorned everything from regional rap records to collections of Gregorian chants and birdsong, and the fact that it was far from legal was no deterrent – not for customers, nor even the musicians that the lord of Italy’s pirate cassette business was ripping off.

Enrico Frattasio created the pirate mixtape label in the early 1980s, selling his tapes to illegal stallholders in his working-class neighbourhood in Naples, which they flogged alongside bootlegged cigarettes. By the late 80s, Erry had spread throughout Italy and beyond, to Romania and Hong Kong. At its peak, the Mixed by Erry group employed 100 people – including Enrico’s brothers, Claudio, Peppe and Angelo – with an annual gross of around £4m in today’s money.