The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #146180   Message #3417950
Posted By: Howard Jones
11-Oct-12 - 03:14 AM
Thread Name: Bill Leader/Dave Bulmer
Subject: RE: Bill Leader/Dave Bulmer
Let's accept that Mr Bulmer is acting entirely lawfully. He owns the assets, it's up to him what he does with them. As I understand it, he cannot yet be required to return the rights to the original artists if he doesn't want to make use of them himself.

Let us also accept that under the terms of the original contracts the original artists will receive no royalties if the albums are released. It may have been naive of them, but they signed the contracts and must live with the consequences.

However:

1) When one of a record label's principal artists suffers a life-changing accident and loses his livelihood, one would expect that most record labels would look beyond the small print of the contract and try to help. Especially if they have no intention of releasing his albums themselves.

Nic Jones is perhaps an extreme example, but we've heard from other artists who would be glad of the chance to sell some of the old recordings. And it's not just about money - a recording represents a huge commitment of time and emotional effort, and artists want to see those albums available and to be able to sell them at gigs or through their websites. So why won't Bulmer deal with them to allow this to happen?

2) Bill Leader's recordings represented some of the most important developments in folk music of their time, as well as a lot of significant source recordings. Whilst those recordings are not "lost", in the sense that there must be many original copies out there, it is a matter of regret that they are not more widely available. If it is not worth releasing them as CDs, it is very cheap to put them online.

3) Bulmer's attitude makes no commercial sense to anyone. With a few exceptions, he won't exploit them himself, and he won't make them available to others. That's a lose-lose all round.

4) In doing so, he has completely trashed his own reputation on the folk scene.

The question no one seems to be able to get an answer to is, why?