Tuesday 22 May 2007

The future is now with music from the past

Today I've got a song planted in my head from my youth. I know the tune. I know part of the lyrics and I've got a desire to add that song and the album it comes from to my music collection. The only problem with this is that I cannot find that album in the stores anymore. So I can't get the cd. It is not available in the few second-hand stores in my town, which presumably comes from the fact that it's a good album. The online stores do not carry it because the music label it was on does not provide it to iTunes c.s.
This leaves the p2p networks as a last resort. However, since the album was released only on vinyl, there are almost no ripped to .mp3 versions of it. I can find a few songs from it, but this particular song is unavailable.

This is exemplatory of a lot of music of my youth. The international artists are often available online, but the local artists aren't. The music industry must have a huge back-catalog of music available only to them and to no-one else. And all they do with it is letting it rot in a cellar, where they could make some money out of it by selling it online via iTunes. On the one hand they talk about how p2p networks are killing them and stealing their profit, but on the other hand, they cannot provide the music to the soundtrack of my life. This feels like very inconsequential behaviour from the music industry. Could we please change that?

Oh and the song? It's "Later is allang begonnen" by "Het Klein Orkest".

Zaaf

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