LOS ANGELES — The Library of Congress is flipping a
switch that will open a large chunk of the national archive of more than
3 million music and spoken-word recordings archive public streaming as
part of a new National Jukebox project, a joint venture between the
library and Sony Music that will give free access to thousands of
Sony-controlled recordings long out of circulation because of commercial
or copyright issues.
Some of the 10,000 titles streamable at the new
National Jukebox website have been unavailable for more than 100 years, a
significant chunk of them because of complex laws controlling ownership
of sound recordings, which did not become subject to federal copyright
laws until 1972.
Among the highlights are vintage performances by
celebrated classical musicians, including Enrico Caruso and Fritz
Kreisler; the first blues recording, “Livery Stable Blues,” made in 1917
by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band; a comedy skit by the Vaudeville
team of Gallagher and Shean; speeches of President Teddy Roosevelt;
piano performances by jazz-ragtime pioneer Eubie Blake; and music of the
John Philip Sousa Band conducted by its namesake.
“This really blows the top off of a lot of stuff,
doesn’t it?” said Chris Sampson, associate dean of the University of
Southern California’s Thornton School of Music. “There are so many
angles from the academic perspective of how this would be a resource.
Just in my small corner of the universe of teaching songwriting, the
ability to be able to go to the source so students can see the tradition
of American music and American songwriting, to see this lineage and to
be able to draw upon it is going to be enormous. … To me that’s just
gold.”
Sony, which claims to control more historical
recordings than any other of the three existing major label groups —
EMI, Warner and Universal music groups — has made available all pre-1925
acoustic recordings originally made for the Victor Talking Machine Co.,
the vast majority of which are not now in circulation. The next phase
of the project, announced Tuesday morning at the Library of Congress’
offices in Washington, D.C., will add early discs made for Columbia
Records, which also is under the Sony umbrella. The project offers no
direct financial gain to Sony, although the company will retain the
rights for the commercial release of anything newly coming available.
“We’re going to release this site with more than
10,000 sides,” said Gene DeAnna, head of the library’s recorded sound
section. “For this project, we’ve had to pull every copy of our Victor
acoustic recordings, examine them all and select what we thought was the
best and send it upstairs for possible digitization.” DeAnna said he
estimates there are roughly an equal number of Columbia discs that
project officials expect to add to the Jukebox this year.
One major component of the project, which has been
about two years in the making, is a digital discography of every
Sony-owned acoustic 78-rpm recording, organized in a searchable
database, prepared at University of California Santa Barbara; each entry
contains extensive information ranging from personnel on each
recording, the date and locations they were made down to which take from
the recording session is on each disc. The library’s files also will be
the source for thousands of pages of documents and images of original
labels, artist biographies and other text and photographic material.
Of the recordings from the late 19th and early 20th
century that are now streamable, “only the Caruso stuff is currently
available,” DeAnna said.
“The only artist whose work has remained in print
since it was recorded is Caruso,” added Matthew Barton, the library’s
curator of recorded sound. “You’ve always been able to get Caruso, in
whatever the current formats were. But he wasn’t the only star of the
day, he wasn’t the only opera singer recording — but he’s the only one
that has been consistently available from the rights holder.”
That speaks to copyright issues that have kept
thousands of recordings off the market even when there have been small
labels that would be interested in issuing them to the niche audiences
they appeal to.
Because sound recordings didn’t get singled out for
federal copyright law protection until 1972, ownership of pre-1972
recordings is complicated by an often impossible-to-unravel web of state
or common laws governing them. A proposal is making its way through
Congress to bring earlier recordings under the 1972 law to enhance
public access and ensure that at some point the recordings go into the
public domain. As the law stands, many recordings dating as far back as
1890 will not enter the public domain before 2067, 177 years after they
were made.
“It’s extremely exciting if even a corner of this
starts to break the dam and get these things beyond the walls of Library
of Congress,” USC’s Sampson said.
Library and Sony officials hope the streaming access
will create new audiences for the old recordings. In the event the
National Jukebox creates a breakout hit recorded in 1909, DeAnna said,
“We have an agreement with Sony that if anything is reissued for the
commercial market, we’ll take them down” from streaming on the Jukebox
site.
Library of Congress staff and guest programmers will
create playlists by genre, time period, artist and other themes, and
members of the public will be able to submit their own playlists for
consideration for publication on the Jukebox website. Users also will be
able to share their playlists and embed the audio player on social
media websites such as Facebook and MySpace.
The collaboration between Sony and the Library of
Congress is intended to keep any cost to taxpayers to a minimum and to
make the streaming files available quickly. In return, Sony will receive
data on which recordings are streamed most frequently to help determine
which may have commercial potential.
The Jukebox Project also will include a digitized
version of the Victor Book of the Opera, a guide the Victor label
published with opera plot outlines, illustrations and other aids to
expand opera fans’ knowledge and appreciation, along with offerings of
their own performances of the works described.
“We’ve scanned the whole book and you can page turn
through it, and when you roll the cursor over the a particular
recording, you can play that selection,” DeAnna said. “For instance,
there’s the famous quartet in (Verdi’s) ‘Rigoletto.’ The catalog lists
11 versions, and you can compare Caruso’s to (Irish tenor) John
McCormack’s, or the Six Brown Brothers’ saxophone sextet version.
There’s also an accordion version.
“You really get the sense there wasn’t such a
distinction between high-brow and low-brow; opera was really part of
popular entertainment then,” DeAnna said. “Can you imagine Lady Gaga
singing (Mozart’s) ‘Queen of the Night’ on her next CD?”
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