David Ayers

'in stock' at amazon.co.uk...

I'm still pursuing leads... Life is hard.

I wonder when the tyranny of the back catalog can be dated from? I know that in classical music if you go back twenty years the back catalog was said to account for 80% of sales. I'm told that now that classical new releases account for most sales, hence the increasingly cheap box sets designed to monetize back catalog. I have much less sense of how this goes in jazz. Certainly on the face of it back catalog is absolutely dominant, as can be seen in any general CD store from the Coltrane and Miles holdings. That said, ECM seems to do well, and lots of artists seem to release and sell many titles on minor labels, plus there is certainly a culture of reviewing and pushing new releases. I'd be interested to know. What were the first reissue programs, I wonder?

Cool - thanks!

I have a feeling not many here are up the Keiji Haino end of things but I'll ask anyway - has anyone ever tried to order direct from the PSF website? There seem to be surprisingly many titles in print. http://www.psfrecords.com/

Psi and Emanem both present a challenge to those interested - there are so many desirable titles! It looks to me like once a title goes OOP it is rarely if ever reprinted and I guess now for Psi that means never. If you have ever looked for FMP titles on amazon or ebay and chewed through your finger when you saw the prices - if you could find the title at all - then you know how it will get with some of these titles perhaps before long. On the topic of rights reverting to artists, all very ethical, but the practical downside is that the artists will be unlikely to reissue them for economic reasons and - whatever formats the future will favor for its reissues (they'll be 'sonic implants' by that time of course) - no-one will ever be able to purchase and reissue the label as a whole. I guess the times are gone when anything like that could happen so maybe not an issue. No worries, maybe, there's a billion items of recorded music on your desktop, but I'd still say now is the time to have (another) dip into Psi, and into Emanem, before - you know - -

Probably not - this has been precipitated because Martin Davidson is moving to Spain. Sales from both labels have been in constant slow decline.

A random search today on Amazon revealed that Savoy just "released" on mp3 the Sammy Price "Rib Joint" package. Greeeeeeezzzzy!!! Finally! A random search! How the hell anybody is supposed to know about these various mp3-only reissues that trickle out from everywhere i don't know. I'll list other things I don't know or am unsure of in a separate thread.

I agree, very few of these new vinyl edition give any idea of how they've been remastered. I'd feel totally cheated if I found that a supposed audiophile vinyl edition was in fact mastered from a digital source. Well, in a straightforward way, many recordings are made at 24 bit, so the pro-vinyl lobby will say that analogue can carry more of that than CD..

PS - except it turns out that the Mobley capitol is much more expensive on amazon.com than on amazon.co.uk. Oops. All there on the streaming services of course.

There's no ethical reason not to get this set, but there's aesthetic reason! From the listing it looks like many of these discs are half full - like those Quadromania 4-CD sets that have less than 2 CDs-worth of material on them. Another thing people have found with the cheaper PD labels is that, while of course they don't remaster from original or second-generation masters - they seem to take no trouble to locate the best remasters already issued, and it has been claimed by people who can do the technical stuff (I can't) that these are often taken from mp3s, not even from CD sources. I'll end this sermon with a suggestion - the entirely legitimate Mobley Complete Capitol sells on amazon on mp3 very cheaply and is identical to the Mosaic. All that said, what the heck, it is legal and cheap, so it all depends whether you buy into the neo-imperialist view on European PD. I guess the British ownership of this material by EMI is now ended and I imagine that the catalogue all this came from is now in the hands of Universal. Not sure but - expect nothing! I wonder if Universal now owns EMI/Capitol's half of Mosaic? Hmmm...

Well, I do know TV music pays well, and I know the names of many who have done it in the past. As for 'fair' pay, who decides? As far as I can see, too much music gets recorded. If there is a paying audience, fine, if not then not. I notice that terrestrial radio pays less than streaming services. But our discussion here is not about that, apparently.

Ever watched TV? did you watch the program through or just enough to decide if you want to buy the DVD? or do you refuse to watch TV and *only* buy the 'physical product'? or do you refuse to fork out for a cable service on the grounds that you don't have a physical product at the end, or that few individuals involved in making the shows make more than $0.01 per viewer per show and most probably make a tiny fraction of that? There's a simple logic to streaming. And TV seems to be doing quite well financially. I don't think the argument is one of general principle, but I do know why we folks here have a concern about how minority music is doing. That said, I don't see the kind of discussion we have here re. royalties on 60-year old recordings reflected in any parallel concerns about e.g. revenues to Laurel and Hardy's estates from youtube clips.

Morelenbaum is sublime - thank you for that! Other great - and hilarious - clips and ideas here. I'm getting to work....

So right on few and listenable. At least, that's the way I've gone, so tired of remasterings in general, it is Russian roulette with a sub-machine gun.

The Supraphon catalogue is still there and widely available for download. The difference now is that there are many more labels at the cheaper end. In Downloadland the price differential between full price, mid and budget is much narrower than it used to be. £7.99 the norm for a full price recording - 10 years ago I was paying up to £15 with the mid price reissues coming in at the 7.99 mark. I never heard a version of the Debussy and Ravel quartets that came anywhere near the Supraphon version by the Vlach Quartet. I was looking for it but nothing turned up - so I started this thread. So, how can you get Supraphon material, Bev? MG The DL is on amazon and it is also on Spotify. Listening now. Sorry - I'm not Bev!

I was thinking about older baroque recordings in general, including Erato. Not many of them hit the mark. I was remembering a miserable trawl I had through the Deutsche Harmonia Mundi reissue program.

Brilliant!

I want to get into something new but i don't know what. Suggestions?

here's the CD cover here I see for the first time, and even more weirdly, the LP cover

I really hope the jazz obsession with reissues doesn't take over in classical. There are so many great recordings coming from France now, especially of baroque music, I can't get sentimental over badly played, badly recorded, badly re-mastered Erato back-catalog.

My former colleague Brian Dillon has made a specialism of the C20th ruin - check out his book: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Ruins-Documents-Contemporary-Brian-Dillon/dp/085488193X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1318580601&sr=8-1 On the satirical side, my own county of origin has come up with this un-gem: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leeds-23482587

That article is not very recent is it? Warner has already taken control of EMI/Virgin Classics and has started to rebrand the products. The rest I don't know about. My observation is that, given the declining fortunes of the recorded music industry, I'm not sure the forced divestments will seem to have been necessary ten or even five years from now.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-ouch-23423541

Moms in the house!