What’s it mean that the back catalogs of record companies documenting 100 years of American music are now wholly owned by the Japanese Sony Corporation, which has bought out Bertelsmann, its German partner in the four-year-old behemoth music corporation Sony BMG?
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Sony now controls the master tapes of Columbia, Okeh, RCA Victor, Bluebird, Epic, Arista, Ariola — labels that brought us the sounds of Enrico Caruso, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, King Oliver, the Carter Family, Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, Jimmy Rogers, Bessie Smith, Duke Ellington, Fats Waller, Holiday, Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Artie Shaw, Arsenio Rodriguez, Hank Williams, Elvis Presley, Chet Atkins, Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Tito Puente, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, the Jefferson Airplane, stereophonic sound, the long-play record, the 45 rpm single, many Broadway shows and much classical repertoire, among other productions. Â This amounts to an invaluable national treasure.
Neither BMG nor Sony, separately or united for the past four years, have been very responsible caretakers of this legacy. There is voluminous out-of-print music in their vaults, and intermittent initiatives to reissue classic works in the latest formats have suffered from lack of follow-through. We thank Columbia Legacy for all those Miles boxed sets as well as Lady Day – The Complete Billie Holiday on Columbia, 1933-1944, and Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys (Legends of Country Music); also BMG for The Duke Ellington Centennial Edition, The Complete RCAVictor Recordings (1927-1973), and Fats Waller’s If You Gotta Ask, You Ain’t Got It! They’ve done the occasional deluxe package proud. But big-ticket sets are also less frequently being scheduled for release.
Both BMG and Sony have continued to record and issue American popular music — Alicia Keyes, Usher, Justin Timberlake, et al — yet efforts in regards to jazz, blues, classical and contemporary composition have mostly been curtailed. The bean-counting experts who run media conglomerates today recognize little profit margin in reissues of classics or attempts to develop anything but likely huge hits. They’re probably right, as long as they ignore the unquantifiable yield of creative productivity. However, if the music of our past is not readily accessible to us (which is the promise of recording processes and the theoretically unlimited storage and distribution available through the Internet) portions of our collective memory are fogged, if not lost. Young listeners — including hit-makers of tomorrow — won’t become very musically literate if corporations don’t bother to make the great music they’ve come to own available for iPods.
Over the last week I advised two highly acclaimed and accomplished musician friends to stop worrying about getting signed by record labels and figure out how to record and distribute their works themselves (though a third musician told me a good indie label will put $$ into production in return for, say 50% of a master he has recorded, and everybody’s happy). Successful models for the time and labor-intensive DIY endeavor include ArtistShare and trumpeter Dave Douglas’s Greenleaf Music. Such business is not for everyone — it requires considerable attention, energy and a stash of working capitol. But why give rights to your creativity away? Especially if the new owners aren’t gonna do anything with those rights but squander creativity’s potential to reach new audiences and seed more creativity?Â