Thread by @jodyrosen

Here’s my new @NYTMag piece. It's about the biggest disaster in the
history of the music business, which was hushed up by the world’s
largest record company. nytimes.com/2019/06/11/mag…

Thought I'd add some post-scripts to this piece—a quick survey of a few music preservation topics/questions that wound up on the cutting room floor. These things are worth thinking about & (in a couple of cases, at least) might be profitably followed up on by journalists.

(NB: Some of the stuff I'm mentioning here is based on reporting that's a couple of years old. Certain facts on the ground may have changed in the interim.)

1.) The Library of Congress/Digital Deposits.

For more than 40 years, since the enactment of the Copyright Act of 1976, the Library of Congress has received copies of every sound recording copyrighted in the U.S. But the era of digital downloads & streaming audio has brought a change.

According to an LOC official I spoke with a couple of years ago, “physical deposits of CDs began to nosedive” sometime around 2010, as record companies increasingly put out music in online-only formats, with no accompanying physical release. No surprise there.

But copyright law has failed to keep up the times. When an online-only recording is registered for copyright, there is no requirement to make a deposit of that content at the LOC.

The consequence is a gap in the historical record: the more or less complete collection of American recorded music that Library of Congress has maintained since the mid-70s now contains significant holes. A key music conservation bulwark has eroded.

The situation is exacerbated by the huge volume of independent and underground music that is released online through web platforms like SoundCloud and Bandcamp. The LOC official told me: "We’re missing a lot of stuff."

A few years back, the LOC made an effort to develop an “eDeposit” program for sound recordings, the first attempt to acquire digital-only recordings through copyright.

In May 2016, the Copyright Office issued a “Notice of Inquiry,” soliciting feedback from stakeholders on the proposed change. That document is here: regulations.gov/document?D=COL…

The reaction of the music industry was discouraging. In a 14-page response, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) asserted that “the vast majority of commercially released sound recordings are widely available online through a variety of digital music services."

In essence, the RIAA's argument—i.e., the argument of the "big three" major labels, whose interests the RIAA represents—was that commercial streaming & download services can serve the cause of conservation as well as the Library of Congress.

"Everything's on Spotify anyway, don't worry about it!" Among other assumptions made here is the notion that Spotify & other streaming services will always be around—like, forever—& will never take any material offline.

The RIAA's comments on the proposal can be found here: file:///Users/jodyrosen/Downloads/Comments_-_Recording_Industry_Association_of_America,_Inc%20(2).pdf

The RIAA’s statement reflected an apparent shift in the posture of the big three labels: preservation is a point to be negotiated, not a cultural duty to be mandated by the government.

Key quote from the RIAA response: “We believe that private agreements—like the ones that Sony and Universal previously entered into—are a superior acquisition tool than a regulatory mandate."

Again, please note: I haven't followed this story & have no idea where the situation stands at present. Might be worth following up on w/the LOC & RIAA, if you're a journalist interested in these questions.

2.) YouTube & Music Preservation.

We all know that YouTube is a huge platform for streaming music. In the recent past, reports have shown that YouTube garners approx 1 billion visitors per month for music streams & accounts for something close to 50% of all music streams globally.

In fact, you could call YouTube a kind of music archive, of a distinctly 21st century sort. The site holds huge repository of old recordings. Many of these are videos posted by record companies, official releases akin to the recordings labels furnish to Spotify.

A greater number are what might be called guerrilla reissues: songs, or full albums, uploaded by users w/out permission from copyright holders. Much of that music is out of commercial circulation, unavailable via any other platform.

Prior to YouTube’s launch, uploads of this kind—homemade digital transfers, ripped from vinyl or cassettes or other analog era formats—were dispersed across the internet, posted on music blogs and file-sharing sites. YouTube of course provides a centralized landing spot.

It’s an enormous user-generated music library, with donations that pour in from the far reaches of the online universe.

YouTube might therefore be regarded as preservation’s great digital age hope, a collectivist conservation effort that is rescuing myriad recordings from oblivion. BUT (always a BUT) viewed from a different angle, YouTube represents more troubling trends.

You could call YouTube a gig economy version of a music archive, which shifts curatorial responsibility from institutions to individuals, while entrusting a vast cultural corpus to—who else?—Google.

And of course the music on YouTube is subject to an array of existential threats peculiar to the internet era. It's vulnerable to catastrophic malfunctions that can impact any form of digital media; it’s susceptible to market upheavals that shake Silicon Valley.

There's no guarantee that YouTube itself will always exist, to say nothing of any individual recording, especially the guerrilla uploads that run afoul of copyright law.

(Major labels devote considerable energy to protecting their property, enforcing “takedowns” of illicit uploads via the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a law that record companies’s legal departments are working to expand.)

In other words...it won't take a fire or a flood to obliterate the huge virtual music vault on YouTube, or the one on Spotify, or any other streaming platform. All that music can vanish instantly—at the ruling of a judge or the whim of a mogul or the click of a mouse.

I mention this bc it's a topic I tried & failed to shoehorn into the Universal fire piece. It may be something worth thinking about more & if someone wants to write/report on it, I for one would read it!

A couple more stray bits/bobs...

3.) Don Bennett/"The Prince Teddy Album."

I've gotten some texts & emails asking about this record. I notice that the copies of the LP that were available on Discogs before the piece went up online are now gone.

About two minutes of the song "Don't Wanna Spoil Your High," to which I devoted a couple of sentences at the end of the Universal fire piece, can be heard here: Song is awesome.

4.) The film and video losses in the backlot vault fire.

Sources tell me that tell me the film & video losses in the backlot fire were HUGE—far greater, in raw numbers terms, than those suffered by UMG, in its music vault. Something like 5/6th of that building was devoted to the storage of NBC Universal film/video assets.

I've been told that the full run of many historically significant TV shows burnt up in the fire. Perhaps there are gaps on Netflix & elsewhere that can be correlated w/the fire?

(IMPORTANT SIDE NOTE: I asked someone who knows if any tapes from "The Apprentice" were stored in that vault. Apparently they weren't. So the pre-2008 Trump/Apprentice tapes didn't burn up.)

Anyway someone needs to report out NBC Universal's losses. Obvs a big story there. One tantalizing detail: in my reporting I saw an email in which a UMG PR official, talking about the record company's success in spinning the press, says: "Uni Studios owes us one." END THREAD