Hey, ask around. Surely there’s a friend or a friend of a friend who’d gladly do it for you.
Oo, I’d love to have one.
Perhaps, yes. But I’d still expect that a lot more new music has been released in the past 20 years - during the CD era, that is - than in the 20 years before that, and so forth. So one would think the resources would be there to at least make a pretty good dent in it, well beyond what’s already been done based on a marketing plan of releasing an album from 1973 as a CD, creating a whole bunch of those CDs upfront, shipping them to record stores, record clubs, distributors, etc.
This shouldn’t really make a difference. If a record company no longer exists, it probably got bought up by another record company. And if it just plain went belly-up, its catalog was an asset that was auctioned off during bankruptcy proceedings, and another record company would have bought that.
This is a more substantive problem. I’ll admit I have no idea how much it costs to digitally remaster a recording, and obviously nobody’s going to bother doing that for a recording if they don’t think they can recoup that cost.
OTOH, this would probably be quite acceptable to a lot of people, and could presumably be done very cheaply. It would also give the record companies a better way to gauge the market for remastering.
I put a handful of my record albums through the vinyl-to-MP3 conversion process a few years back, and I was pleased with the quality - and these were records that had seen use, with pops and scratches and stuff; they weren’t essentially untouched master recordings.
I didn’t do much of it because the stereo and the computer were on opposite ends of the house, so connecting the two involved moving a lot of stuff, connecting it, babysitting the transferral process, then moving it all back when I was done. It got old. But now that I’ve bought a laptop, that’ll get rid of the (literal) heavy lifting, so I may be doing a bit more of this. 
What is a disturbing trend in audiocassette evolution, though, is that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find suitable storage units for them. Used to be, you could go into a major music store (Tower Records, e.g.) and buy a little suitcase-looking thing that would accommodate 60, 90, even 120 audiocassettes. That’s for lugging around. You could also get a set of drawers for storing a couple of hundred cassettes.
These storage solutions no longer appear to be getting manufactured. Unless you happen to know otherwise, in which case I’d love to see a link, and kaylasmom will likely ask me to bake you some banana muffins to express her gratitude for the lead.
Here ya go kaylasdad99
A big proportion of the stuff I’m thinking about are recordings of classical music. There’s a far more substantial amount of this from the pre-CD era.
Trust me, chasing up copyrights and licensing takes a huge amount of time. Which means cost.
Sales of a non-remastered crappy transfer would give them no idea of what the demand for a clean remaster would be like. The differences are too great (a good remastering can sound incredible.)
I’ll confess I was thinking mostly of popular music. I see your point - with classical, the difference between remastering and digitally recording a master is substantial.
With popular music that’s not popular enough to have already been re-released, it’s a whole 'nother proposition. Nobody’s going to notice whether that Dick and Deedee mp3 was from a remastering or not.
I don’t get this. Do record companies not own the rights to keep on reissuing the recordings they issued originally? What licenses do they have to re-obtain as time goes by?
I’m asking this with all sincerity - just with a bit of surprise. I admit my ignorance here.
Just as one example, the Yorkville label out of Toronto (late '60s-mid’70s) went bankrupt. Decades later, their master tapes were discovered in a dank, leaky warehouse in Buffalo, NY, many of them irreparably damaged by abysmally poor storage. At some point, they were bought up by a holding company. So the recordings of dozens of artists are no longer available to anyone, unless they can be restored from vinyl pressings. The problem there is to find any of them, and then find any of them in playable condition. And then there are the licensing and publishing and other hurdles to overcome. So far, you can only get the works of one group - The Ugly Ducklings - reissued on CD. “Virginia (Touch Me Like You Do)” by Bill Amesbury has been reissued on some compilations. That is now the extent of the Yorkville catalogue in digital form.
It costs thousands and thousands of dollars. That’s why there are specialty collectors’ labels such as Ace, Sundazed and One Way that take on these projects, digitally remastering back-catalogue items from the major labels that the major labels won’t issue on their own. For instance, up until last year, RCA would not reissue The Guess Who albums on CD. But they would lease the master tapes to Buddha Records, who painstakingly restored and reissued a few of them, with bonus tracks, and they were distributed by…RCA. Then Buddha went bankrupt. Capitol owns the Bloodrock catalogue. Would they reissue it? No. But you can get their albums on One Way. Distributed by…Capitol.
And so it goes.
Why, it’ll be a cold day in hell before I ride in one of those “horseless carriages”. And how about those new-fangled “indoor” crappers? What’s the matter, outhouse ain’t good enough fer ya? Well la-ti-ta Mr. fancy pants with your indoor plumbing. That’s the way it was, and we LOVED it.
Count me in as another vinyl consumer! I’m lucky, I listen to mostly punk and vinyl has always been and continues to be the perfered format. In fact punk (and hip hop) pretty much kept vinyl alive in the 90s.
Lots of punk rock isn’t even released on CD, especially 7" singles and 10" Ep’s and records are usually cheaper too. I usually pay around 10 bucks for a full length and around three dollars for a 7". I’ve been noticing lately that there’s a lot more major label stuff being released on vinyl, but of course those records get sold for 15-20 dollars which IMHO is bullshit. If an indie label can sell a record for ten bucks and turn a profit, so can corporate labels. Hell, even most indie CD’s are priced around 10 dollars. I guess the majors need the extra money to fund all the suits cocaine habits.
It’s generally not something that the big record companies are interested in doing, at least in the classical field. The potential profits are miniscule when compared with pushing the next-big-thing. This is why I was talking about licencing in particuar - what reissuing is being done is by small specialist companies such as Dutton.
Regarding the logistics of copyrights etc. - taking a decades-old recording and finding the exact situation being dealt with means going back to the original contracts and agreements. As just one example, the performers (or their estates) may be entitled to royalties or other fees from reissues. Where a defunct company has been subsumed by a large one, the relevant legal documents and so on are theoretically still stored somewhere. But imagine the size of the archives of paperwork for a company like Sony. And you can be sure that properly cataloguing the contracts from a two-bit classical outfit acquired in the sixties has never been a priority. So all the information is out there, somewhere, but if it’ll take a week for an employee to hunt down the paperwork, that’s still a week’s salary eating into the profits. And if after that week, the necessary documents aren’t found, that’s money down the drain. And if the paperwork is stored in various locations, perhaps some with a London solicitor, others in an LA warehouse, … I’m sure you get the picture.
Egads Man! Assuming the digital files and CD’s are mostly duplicates of your LP collection, your albums alone would take about 275 days to play, non-stop, 24/7. Envy, thy name is JohnBckWLD.