>I was going to post about this after seeing the article on
>Twitter yesterday.
>
>Whew. My blood is boiling! Boiling!
>
>...and I haven't even finished reading the article.
>
>There’s a larger story here about why they owned the masters
>for all of those legendary labels. No company should have
>owned all of that music in the first place.
>
Right. The current structure is *just* short of being monopolistic. Companies that big that aren't structured and incentivised to tend to parts of their business which are basically sinks for money, like archiving masters. It would be great if a non-profit or some other group which actually cares about artistry and music could take over archviving for all that music. But that organization would need some deep pockets and time to create the heirarchy and infrastructure necessary to pull that off.

On a side note, there's a portion of the article that refers to a 'cloud storage' company for lack of a better term that has a number of digitized versions of masters. They'll be preserved for some time but apparently artists and labels who want to look at their masters have to pay some sort of check-out fee. Which limits the possibility of reissues of albums which weren't big sellers or may not have much interest from music afficinados. It's great that everyone's getting paid here, but it does seem like the artists and art fans, as usual, are the losers.

>By the way, I don’t think this is what most people would
>call traditional “music journalism.” This is an
>interesting feature story that happens to be music-related, if
>that makes sense.

That's a good point. This article was more investigative journalism than a music review or culture critique. My problem with music journalism is that many of the journalists don't convey they know much about the craft of music making or don't know how to articulate their tastes. And of course you have people trying to be personalities rather than just talking about the music. Signed, Uncle Ruckus.

That aside, this article was really well written. For an article that long, the 'pace' never slowed down and I was engaged throughout, even when the details got Inside Baseball.