In the 1980s and 1990s, cassette piracy in Kenya was so widespread that musicians could sell 100,000 copies of an album and earn almost nothing. Street vendors sold bootlegs for a fraction of the price of an original tape, and there was no enforcement. Artists like D.O. Misiani, Joseph Kamaru, and others watched their music spread across the country while they struggled to pay studio bills. By the 2000s, the industry had collapsed. The piracy economy is why Kenya has so few music millionaires from that era.