Ian Anderson has been having technical difficulty posting to Mudcat today (like many of us, I suspect) so he asked me to post the following on his behalf:


The problem with sites like this is that they rely on the artist contacting them and asking them to remove the album. The same technology which makes it easy to copy and distribute the music also makes it easier to track down and contact the copyright holder. If these sites would make the effort to get permission before putting albums up for download a lot of these problems would disappear. This would then leave a small number of albums which it is reasonably safe to assume will never be re-released, and there may be a moral case, if not a legal one, for making these available for posterity.

Well put.

What none of the diverse and in some cases hypocritically self-justifying other posts here deal with is the situation I described in post 15. What about the case where an artist has good reasons for NOT wanting an album to be available any more? In my case simply because it was crap, but I can think of many others: a bad and/or unauthorised live recording, songs that carry unwelcome emotional baggage, songs that espouse a viewpoint that the writer no longer holds, songs that have been previously or subsequently recorded in better performances or sound quality. Also, in my case, piss poor dubs off bad vinyl pressings. As well as having the right to gain even a tiny amount of income from back catalogue, artists ought to at least be given the respect of being allowed to decide whether something that has deliberately been made unavailable stays that way, or given the respect of only making their music available in decent quality.

I appreciate that shouts of hypocrisy could be aimed at me too. In the 1960s I was part of a movement (probably started by Harry Smith) that saw nothing wrong in "liberating" old '20s & '30s 78s and re-issuing them on vinyl since the labels that theoretically owned them didn't even know they had them, or that anybody wanted them, and certainly weren't about to do it themselves. And so people then went looking for artists like Son House and Skip James who, as a direct result, got second careers, and in the end the likes of Sony did re-issue their Robert Johnson boxes to the benefit of his (claimed) heirs.

Somehow, though, I find it difficult to equate today's pirate ego-bloggers with that. If we'd had the internet in the 1960s to help tracking down the artists first it would have been a very different story and - if the models of exemplary re-issue labels who grew out of that era like Arhoolie and Ace were followed - the artists would get paid.