In 1987, Billy Joel released a live album recorded as part of his tour in the USSR. The Russian word for concert is концерт. This is romanized and pronounced “kontsert”. So this is what the album was named: Kontsert. Except it was actually spelled on the album cover in Cyrillic.
So when English record companies went to enter it into their systems, instead of entering the romanized version of the word, they just entered whatever letter looked most similar to them. And those records were what was later used as the basis of music databases like the ones used by iTunes.
To this day, you can go on Spotify and listen to Billy Joel’s live record from the USSR, titled “Kohuept”
Cool Cyrillic story.
In 1987, Billy Joel released a live album recorded as part of his tour in the USSR. The Russian word for concert is концерт. This is romanized and pronounced “kontsert”. So this is what the album was named: Kontsert. Except it was actually spelled on the album cover in Cyrillic.
So when English record companies went to enter it into their systems, instead of entering the romanized version of the word, they just entered whatever letter looked most similar to them. And those records were what was later used as the basis of music databases like the ones used by iTunes.
To this day, you can go on Spotify and listen to Billy Joel’s live record from the USSR, titled “Kohuept”