Online Music Brings New Life To Old Music

Rick Zeman writes to tell us The Washington Post has a look at how online music has helped to revitalize eclectic or out of print music. From the article: " Because the Internet has changed how people discover and share music, the rules of marketing it and the hierarchy of who determines what's hot have also changed. As radio-music listenership declines, the industry finds itself spending more time courting a broader field of tastemakers who, through Web sites, are popularizing songs that never get radio play. The primary tool in this transition is the playlist -- a sequence of tracks posted on blogs or shared on music purchase sites such as iTunes. Not just that, but also 'about 2,700 albums have been brought back through the Vault, with more than 5,000 scheduled to follow' with those albums not having enough demand to justify another printing."

Comments

Long tail

[Anonymous Coward]

This sounds great to me, although not exactly a new thing. If you haven't read about the "Long Tail" phenomenon you might be interested in these two articles:

Chris Anderson's article in Wired: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html
A Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_tail

Re:Soundtracks?

[HyperBlazer]

Yeah, but where is the original "Hair" soundtrack from the mid 70's? Or, an original "Fiddler on the Roof"?

I've got Hair on LP but I don't own a turntable anymore

1968, not mid-70s (assuming you're referring to the Broadway soundtrack). And it's right here. If what you want is the 1978 movie, you can get the DVD, but I don't know why you would want to.

A BMG for rare records?

[lavaface]

I was just thinking about this subject the other day as I perused the BMG catalog. If you're not familiar, BMG are the folks behind the "Get 11 records free when you purchase one" gimmick. The way they are able to offer this is by licensing the music from the record labels and pressing CDs themselves. You'll see some type of disclaimer printed on the disc to that effect. While I managed to find a number of discs I wanted (sonic youth, ween, helmet . . .) I was dismayed their catalog lacked depth. For instance, I've been listening to some BIlly Cobham lately (a phenomenal drummer sampled by DJ Shadow, Massive Attack and others) and would love it if I could get one of his records through a service like this.

Of course, manufacturing costs would probably be prohibitive for large pressings but with digital distribution and one-off pressing, there's some money to be made. Incidentally, I checked on iTunes music store and was surprised to find a large part of his discography available. To boot, most of the albums were less than $8, a surprise considering I thought all albums were at least 9.99. I also was surprised by their "collections" service, which is a type of curated playlist. The breakbeat collection, at least was fairly extensive. I may wind up going with iTMS but would prefer unencumbered Mp3s. Actually, considering I've already downloaded most of the MP3s, I just wish there was a simple escrow service where I could toss some bucks directly to the artist--consider it a hat on a digital street ; )

Re:brings life to obscure music with COVER songs,

[Phroggy]

Turns out the rest of the album was pretty good, and it remains planted on my playlist (after the requisite ripping to 320K .mp3, of course).

I hope you understand that if you bought a 128kbps AAC file, then re-encoded it as 320kbps MP3, the resulting MP3 file will be WORSE quality than the original AAC file (in adition to being 2.5 times the file size). Interoperability is the only valid reason for doing this; if that's why you're doing it, carry on.

Backups no longer illegal in Australia

[mysta]

The ability to legally time-shift, format-shift and backup was made legal last month in Australia.