Stim, I was responding to the email from Mr Bulmer quoted by Phil Edwards. As I said in a previous post, Bulmer is under no obligation to do anything with the recordings he owns. However it seems strange to me that he does not want to exploit them commercially, when there is clearly strong demand for some of them.

Putting recordings online for downloading is cheap - $49 per album with CD Baby for example. He already owns most of the necessary rights, apart from MCPS which is also not expensive. Ideally he should also spend a bit on remastering, but people will still download them in their original state.

1000 CDs with inserts and cellophane-wrapped jewel cases can be duplicated for around £650. Even allowing for the other costs, the total probably wouldn't be much more than £1 per CD which would sell at between £10 and £15.

Not everything would have commercial value, but I have no doubt he would not lose money by making at least some of it commercially available in a proper format. He doesn't appear to be interested in doing this, or indeed in doing anything else with it. This is of course his prerogative, but it is understandable that it upsets people that some of the most significant recordings of an era are effectively unobtainable. (It also upsets them that the artists are being deprived of income from their work, which is a separate although equally, if not more, important issue).