David Sanjek on philosophy, archives and missing masters

August 18th, 2009 · · Uncategorized 6 comments

I went to Manchester yesterday to speak with David Sanjek – former head of archives at BMI in the US, now a professor at the University of Salford.

We ended up talking for three hours over coffee and covered everything from the history of music copyright in America to the effect of digitalisation on the practice of archiving. There’s a lot of information to sort through, and a lot of very helpful leads to follow up on.

But I thought I’d give you a taste of the conversation – which included some real eye-opening revelations.

David reassured me that the boss of any record label could demand an inventory of all that label’s assets at any time and be sure of its comprehensiveness. But a stocktake might reveal a slightly different picture.

In brief, his assertion is:

1) A record that is not in circulation but only exists as an archival copy in a vault effectively doesn’t exist;

2) The archival copy in the vault may not exist either.

In other words – it’s worse than we thought.

However, since there is, at present, no legal or (theoretically) economic imperative to make these recordings available, it’s not really considered to be that much of a problem. Culturally speaking, of course, it’s a disaster.

Have a listen.