Leaving aside the ethical issues for a moment, Peter's recordings represent a huge and unique snapshot of British and Irish folk culture on tape and video. No-one can be under the illusion that the BBC would have preserved that material or made it available.

Peter told me that Folktrax grew out of study tapes that he produced for students at Dartingon, and he always saw them as study tapes, not polished commercial products. whilst one can argue the pros and cons of that policy, he did not intend them to be comparable with Veteran, Topic, etc. Most of the recordings in his Folktrax catalogue simply did not sell.

On the point of making material available through the internet - it's a nice idea but takes a lot of work. The British Library has the resouces and has put some recordings on line, but, for example, I have made many hours of sound and video recordings of source singers that I have recorded. The 'best' of the sound recordings have been made available through Musical Traditions, VOTP and Properjob
Publications, but that still leaves a large body of my work 'unpublished'. Ideally I would like to put it all up on the internet but
a) it would take time and effort to get all the permissions from the performers or descendants of the performers,
b) It would take me many hours of work
c) I can't see there being any funding for it.

These are the factors holding me back.

Tradsinger

Tradsinger