The Library of Congress has opened a large chunk of the national archive of more than 3 million music and spoken-word recordings for online public streaming as part of a new National Jukebox project, a joint venture between the library and Sony Music that will give free access to thousands of Sony-controlled recordings long out of circulation because of commercial or copyright issues.
Some of the 10,000 titles streamable at the new National Jukebox website, loc.gov/jukebox, have been unavailable for more than 100 years, a significant chunk of them because of complex laws controlling ownership of sound recordings, which did not become subject to federal copyright laws until 1972.
Among the highlights are vintage performances by celebrated classical musicians, including Enrico Caruso and Fritz Kreisler; the first blues recording, "Livery Stable Blues," made in 1917 by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band; a comedy skit by the vaudeville team of Gallagher and Shean; speeches of President Theodore Roosevelt; piano performances by jazz-ragtime pioneer Eubie Blake; and music of the John Philip Sousa Band conducted by its namesake.
"This really blows the top off of a lot of stuff, doesn't it?" said Chris Sampson, associate dean of the University of Southern California's Thornton School of Music. "There are so many angles from the academic perspective of how this would be a resource. Just in my small corner of the universe of teaching songwriting, the ability to be able to go to the source so students can see the tradition of American music and American songwriting, to see this lineage and to be able to draw upon it is going to be enormous. ... To me, that's just gold."
Sony, which says it controls more historical recordings than any other of the three existing major label groups - EMI, Warner and Universal music groups - has made available all pre-1925 acoustic recordings originally made for the Victor Talking Machine Co., the vast majority of which are not now in circulation.
The next phase of the project, announced Tuesday morning at the Library of Congress' offices in Washington, will add early discs made for Columbia Records, which also is under the Sony umbrella. The project offers no direct financial gain to Sony, although the company will retain the rights for the commercial release of anything newly coming available.
"We're going to release this site with more than 10,000 sides," said Gene DeAnna, head of the library's recorded sound section. "For this project, we've had to pull every copy of our Victor acoustic recordings, examine them all and select what we thought was the best and send it upstairs for possible digitization." DeAnna said he estimates there are roughly an equal number of Columbia discs that project officials expect to add to the Jukebox this year.
One major component of the project, which has been about two years in the making, is a digital discography of every Sony-owned acoustic 78-rpm recording, organized in a searchable database, prepared at UC Santa Barbara; each entry contains extensive information ranging from personnel on each recording, the date and locations they were made down to which take from the recording session is on each disc. The library's files also will be the source for thousands of pages of documents and images of original labels, artist biographies and other text and photographic material.
Copyright issues have kept thousands of recordings off the market, even when small labels have expressed interest in issuing them to the niche audiences they appeal to.
Because sound recordings didn't get singled out for federal copyright law protection until 1972, ownership of pre-1972 recordings is complicated by an often impossible-to-unravel web of state or common laws governing them.
Source | http://www.sfgate.com/
No comments:
Post a Comment