If you’re a fan of rap or R&B and have a thing for vinyl, chances are you got the gift of wax this holiday season. Did somebody surprise you with an LP copy of, say, Kendrick Lamar’s Section.80, Frank Ocean’s Channel Orange, or Kanye West’s Yeezus? Well, whether you know it or not, you’re now the proud owner of a bootleg record.

I first saw a real live bootleg in spring 2013 at the CHIRP Record Fair, at which point I’d already encountered online evidence of a bootleg vinyl version of Frank Ocean’s Channel Orange. Local record distributor Groove Distribution had a handful of bootlegs at its table, and I dropped $20 on a copy of Frank Ocean’s breakthrough 2011 release, Nostalgia, Ultra, largely because I couldn’t believe that a vinyl version of a freely downloadable mixtape actually existed. Since then I’ve developed a minor obsession with bootleg LPs of popular rap and R&B artists, and I’ve found quite a few.

Barber says Chicago rap artists have been putting all their eggs in the digital basket over the past three to five years, and hip-hop and R&B fans all over the developed world seem to prefer to consume music as 320 kbps MP3s, not 180-gram vinyl. “The people that are buying vinyl are either true collectors or they’re just people who like the way it sounds,” Barber says. “It’s definitely not super popular within the hip-hop landscape.”

Unlicensed LPs continue to trickle into record stores because people keep buying them. Maybe these customers are like me and let their curiosity get the better of their good sense; maybe they simply don’t realize they’re depriving the artists of sales. “I think that there’s a weird psychic damage that happens to artists when their material is bootlegged,” says Sevier, who’s certainly dealt with his share of artists burned by labels acting like bootleggers. If there’s an upside to this activity, it’s that bootleggers inadvertently alert labels to instances where they’re leaving money on the table. “Labels need to get more in touch with what record collectors desire,” says Chris Lantinen, founder of record-fiend blog and consumer guide Modern Vinyl. “The recent bootleg release of Kanye West’s Graduation is a perfect example. Why not ever press this album, allowing for a bootleg producer to take advantage of that miscue?”