News today that Guy Hands has lost his case in court means that bankruptcy seems likely and Citigroup will no doubt sell off the assets to the highest bidder.

That includes, as everyone points out, the lucrative publishing arm of the business. What doesn’t get talked about so much is the archive of all the old master tapes of the back catalogue. And I’m not just talking about the Beatles.

I sort of half-joked when all this started to look like a problem that the British Government should nationalise EMI. Now I’m not joking.

I said:

After all, a case could be made that things that are of significant worth to the British public, economically and culturally speaking, should theoretically be in the ownership of the British public. Especially when those assets are under serious threat as a result of private ownership mismanagement and ‘market conditions’.

Rather than have the rights to some of the most important British cultural treasures in the hands of a billionaire tax exile, a private equity firm and a transnational bank – and in imminent danger of having them simply flogged off to who knows where just to dispense with what has become, in financial terms, a ‘toxic asset’ – it would make sense to put them into public ownership.

Honestly, I don’t care if EMI ever releases another record. What’s important is that the full history of that label (and not just the things currently available in stores) be preserved properly and made available as a cultural treasure for the British people.

There’ll be a firesale price. Pay it, fold the money-losing recording company, release the artists from their contracts, and keep the archives.

My pick? Give it to the BBC and put it in the care of Tony Ageh with specific instructions to make sure it’s digitised, kept indefinitely and made available. Give them the publishing wing while you’re at it, to pay for the cost of digitisation, preservation, curation and stewardship.

And make sure they understand (as Ageh seems to) that ownership by the BBC means ownership by the public. And that means that the recordings themselves are fast-tracked into the public domain.

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UPDATE: Just to be absolutely clear – there’s a strong possibility that if the company is stripped of assets, whoever ends up with the old reels of tape is just as likely to bin or burn those that are not potential sources of revenue. For a commercial investor, a tape in a vault represents little more than an expense. And for the vast majority of what’s in there, these are the only decent copies in existence.

This is well worth a read. The man who gave us iPlayer and Wired UK gave a presentation this past week about the BBC Archives. He talks about a digital public space for public content – and also says almost exactly what I said the following day at the Like Minds conference about curation: “what’s interesting is not up to me”.

Read the full text of his presentation here.

Read the Guardian article here.

Now he’s been chosen to help select 25 new entries each year into the National Recording Registry at the US National Library of Congress.

Read the BBC article here.

A recent report by the Library of Congress has brought attention to the ways in which our copyright laws threaten the very existence of those parts of our historical memory that have been recorded.

As Ars Technica explains:

The Library of Congress has released a sobering new report on the state of digital audio preservation in the United States. The Library’s National Recording Preservation Board concludes that most of the nation’s audio libraries are ill-equipped to handle the complex array of streams and digital formats by which music and other recorded sounds are released today.

“It is relatively easy to recognize the importance of recorded sound from decades ago,” the survey notes. “What is not so evident is that older recordings actually have better prospects to survive another 150 years than recordings made last week using digital technologies.”

But even those older artifacts face the prospect of being lost to posterity because of our nation’s copyright laws. So concludes The State of Recorded Sound Preservation in the United States: A National Legacy at Risk in the Digital Age (PDF).

“Were copyright law followed to the letter, little audio preservation would be undertaken,” the report warns. “Were the law strictly enforced, it would brand virtually all audio preservation as illegal.”

Peter kindly refers to this blog in his post, which makes this post about his kind of circular – but the report he links to is one to add to a growing pile of worrying evidence that by and large, and with only occasional important exceptions, our sonic culture is being systematically erased by laws designed solely to remove friction for the maximisation of profit.

Historic music find ‘redefines’ swing era jazz

Great video from BBC America about a collection of music that helps change our understanding of the swing era, and the ‘real’ way that people played when given the opportunity to stretch out.

When it comes to great jazz music you can hardly beat the live recordings from the height of the 1930s swing era.

There has always been chatter about a mysterious treasure trove of unreleased material known as the Savory collection. Recorded by the audio engineer Bill Savory – these live performances filled nearly 1,000 discs.

Now the entire collection has been acquired by the National Jazz Museum in Harlem. The museum’s curator, Loren Schoenberg, takes us on a spin through this unique part of jazz history.

Don’t you love hobbyist enthusiasts who kept private collections? Wonder how many of them are out there undiscovered though…

The message is not that digital is a poor way to store data for future generations – but that preservation is enhanced by multiple copies… something that digital media excel at.

Storing Treasured Memories On CD May Be Risky

As digital recording has become the norm, so has digital storage — many consumers and news outlets now archive their files on CD. But while tape recordings can last up to 150 years, CDs can deteriorate after only a few years. Recording expert Sam Brylawski explains how to preserve your digital memories.

“We’re talking about a culture of classic popular music that is one of America’s great gifts to the world, and it’s in danger of disappearing unless we preserve it for future generations,” said Feinstein on a recent afternoon, relaxing in the living room of his Upper East Side Manhattan townhouse. “These are the passions of my life.”

Ray Charles leaves soul to kids

His entire estate was turned over to the foundation after he died of cancer in 2004, aged 73. None of Charles’ 12 adult children is involved with it.

A few years before he died, Charles advised he would bequeath US$500,000 to each of them and warned them not to challenge his wishes. One did sue in 2008 for Charles’ intellectual property rights but was rebuffed in court.

Foundation president Valerie Ervin’s main job is to increase the value of the foundation’s investments – a task she aced by ensuring it was not affected by the 2008 stock market crash – and to give away about US$5 million annually.

Its reach has been broadened to education in general, including grants totaling US$5 million to Morehouse College, a university for black men in Atlanta.

Ervin demands quarterly reports from beneficiaries and makes surprise visits to see how funds are spent. A board of directors provides an extra level of oversight. The foundation’s overheads are low with five employees.

The foundation also has a licensing arm, which handles post-1960 recordings. Through a venture with Concord Records, it will release the album Rare Genius: The Undiscovered Masters on October 26. Among tracks is a duet with Johnny Cash on Kris Kristofferson’s Why Me, Lord?

“We own everything,” said Ervin, who ran Charles’ affairs in the last decade of his life. “Mr Charles was adamant that he own everything that was related to him.” (In fact, Atlantic Records owns recordings from the 1950s, but the foundation controls usage.)

Indeed, Robert Pruter, author of “Chicago Soul,” calls the research and archival work that Numero does “superlative.” “They do an extraordinary job of documenting,” he says. Pruter, a librarian at Romeoville-based Lewis University, says soul and R&B rarely get the same attention from academics that jazz and blues do, but he predicts that someday it will, and he believes that Numero’s compilations will be key when that day comes.

“Twenty years from now, the sort of people (Numero) is talking to will be dead, and history will die with them,” says Pruter.

For anyone who’s wondering, Shipley and company don’t go about producing historic documents by digging through old records. Any used records of use to Numero have already been picked up by someone else, explains Rob Sevier, Numero’s arts and repertoire guru. Instead, Numero goes through primary sources like producers, artists and label execs to find the music it’s looking for.

Not anymore. McCartney has decided to digitize everything he has and is moving it to the cloud.