I was reading an article in the Australian publication ‘The Vine’ this morning. A meandering piece about music in the digital age, apps, music formats, archives and reissues. It’s worth a read if you have ten minutes to go for a leisurely mental stroll.
This bit leapt out at me:
Gil Matthews is probably best known as the drummer for Billy Thorpe and the Aztecs, but he has also built a solid business giving many classic Australian albums new life on CD. Since 2005 the label Aztec Music has released about 60 titles, each with high-quality packaging and a 28-page booklet, creating a business with a yearly turnover of about $250,000. ”There are an incredible number of titles we could release if we had the time,” says Matthews. ”If we had a catalogue of 300 titles, this would be close to a million-dollar business.”
Each release is a painstaking process, requiring Matthews to go back to the ageing master tapes — or even vinyl if tapes are unavailable — and restore them for the digital format. ”Sometimes it can take 40 hours alone to remove all the clicks and pops from the original source — it’s almost a labour of love,” says Matthews.
It sounds like the kind of labour of love that might economically justify opening up the vaults, seeing what’s in there and figuring out if there is, in the first instance, a commercial imperative for reissuing back catalogue that major labels have more or less locked away to rot because they don’t feed the new release, promo, popstar machine.
Yes there is some healthy activity in the area of reissues (both physical and digital), but these tend to be the perennial moneymakers and still-active artists that can leverage big money at corporate levels of turnover. But cottage industry outfits like that of Matthews could be more than sustainable on the number of units that less well-remembered artists might sell – and not only would this create economic value, grow the industry, put more music in more hands and return money to artists… but it would also rescue some significant works of cultural heritage from inevitable decay.
Of course, for this to work, licences would need to be worked out, vault inventories would need to be made available, and – ideally – copyright laws would need to be changed to include a use-it-or-lose-it clause that would incentivise the major labels to maximise the value hidden in their own coffers.
