This afternoon, I interviewed Matt Mason, author of the book The Pirate’s Dilemma, about music, culture, law and the public domain.
We talked about all of the music that’s sitting in the vaults, decaying on master tapes – and Matt shared some good ideas about how this situation could be addressed, from a practical and digitally savvy perspective.
These are a couple of choice quotes from that half-hour interview, which was full of interesting insights and parallels from other cultural industries. I’ll go through the interview in more detail when I get a chance, and transcribe bits that I want to use for the book. But as I find these interesting excerpts, I’ll post them up here for you to listen to and discuss.
It was really great to talk to Matt – someone who’s given these matters a great deal of thought – and I can thoroughly recommend his book (here it is at Amazon).
I’ve also just secured an interview with Dr David Sanjek, former director of the BMI archive and now Director of the Centre for Popular Music at the University of Salford. Looking forward to that one too.
2 Responses to “Matt Mason on opening the vaults”
It’s like recycling. We are constantly urged to recycle so materials can be preserved and renewed to create new objects etc, why not music? There can be an economic benefit as well as a cultural benefit (equivalent to environmental).
Looking forward to hearing the rest of the interviews
This reminds me of an article I recently read in Record Collector (August 2009, Issue 365, p. 22/23).
RC introduces its readers to Bob George who lives in New York, and in particular to his work. Guess what, Bob is a professional (!) vinyl record collector. He “aims to collect two copies of every vinyl album ever made”. He estimates to have 3 Mio. vinyls.
As the article shows, there are aspects which simply can not be digitised – in particular in all their haptic glory (he also owns a scratch ‘n’ sniff record).
However, to save a cultural heritage like this at least to its visible and audible part you can only do it by a huge effort in digitisation.
You might ask yourself how Bob is making his living… well, there are some sponsor you might know: Keith Richards, Lou Reed, David Byrne, John Hammond, Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, Paul Simon, Martin Scorsese, and Jonathan Demme. I guess there are even more.
I was glad to read such an archive exists.