The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #126218   Message #2805625
Posted By: Jack Blandiver
07-Jan-10 - 07:09 AM
Thread Name: Free Rare Old Folk Album Downloads
Subject: RE: Free Rare Old Folk Album Downloads
May I suggest Topics 24 CD Voice Of The People set if you are after Feral singing...(What's Feral about singing?).
Not available as a download sadly. It will cost you several hundred pounds, but as it probably cost many thousands to produce. A small price to pay I feel, if you're really interested.


How much happier a world it would be if Topic followed the example set by The Max Hunter Folk Collection and put their entire field-recorded / traditional archive on-line where we might explore it at our leisure instead of in selectively edited instalments. As such, it's just another lifestyle commodity for those who can afford it - and a million miles removed from the circumstances of the singers & musicians it was recorded from in the first place. That's some remove! That said, I do appear to own most of VOTP, though I might lament that Felix Doran's spoken intro from The Fox Hunt has been cruelly excised for the CD, much less isolated from The Last of the Travelling Pipers album, which was selected from yet more stuff that has never seen the light of day. And now we're getting the same treatment of the Kennedy Archive, which was controversial even back in Kennedy's day - mutter, mutter. Voice of the People? Give it back to the people - not free; 30p per download should keep the venture ticking over just nicely.

For the gazillionth time: comparing the sharing of one-to-one copies of a CD, or samples of an artist's work (as opposed to full albums) with a friend (in the hope that they will enjoy the music and probably go on to buy some of it themselves) is not the same as uploading whole albums onto the internet where they becomes a limitless commodity.

The copying of a record is still illegal, Joan - and on tape or CD-R it can just as easily become a limitless commodity - if you pass it on to someone, who passes it on to two other people, and each of those etc. etc. - which is just as likely as blogged albums affecting the sales of Official Product. This is, after all, a matter of principle.

I mean, duh. Seriously.

You said it.

MY LOVE for this music will not stop and my respect to the artists is eternal ... they make my soul and mind travel.

That sums up the blogging culture perfectly. Great post.