Some of the labels (Proper and NOT) were doing a better job than the majors. It's a pity Macca had a hissy fit and changed the copyright law.
I agree with JP. That Ray Charles set was released by Documents/Membran, in my view one of the worst public-domain labels when it comes to sound quality. Awful. Haven't heard this particular set, though.
Here's a couple of other PD labels: Jazz Images, located in Barcelona and probably associated with Wax Time. Their gimmick is that the covers are performance photographs by Jean-Pierre Memoir rather than the iconic originals. I have "Mingus Ah Um" which is rather rich for my blood in vintage. Like Wax Time, these are excellent pressings and packaging, but presumably CD rips. DOL is rather coy about their origins; a sticker on the sleeve of "The Music from Peter Gunn" says "MADE IN ENGLAND" while the sleeve itself says "Manufactured in Europe". It also says DOL is a trademark of VINYLOGY along with a defunct website. www.vinylogy.ru ; so, Russian. Finally, Vinyl Passion specializes in live bootlegs, although I have a PD compilation of Arvo Pärt.
I ended up getting the Ray Charles Genius & Soul - The 50th Anniversary Collection box set instead. Its from Rhino and sounds great.
No! This is one of many things which we will still be beholden to the EU for 'guidance' on, long after UK leaves EU.
For the record, I just came across a listing for Chrome Dreams UK, which seems to have a lot of jazz. My only experience is with a Gene Vincent 4cd set. That set has a nice booklet, and I like what I am hearing. But as far as I can see nearly every listing on the site only takes artists upto 1962.
That's because of the EU copyright extension on music recordings, from 50 to 70 years, decided in 2011. Public domain labels will be limited to releasing pre-1963 material for a long while, until 2033.
I personally regret that the last year under the present regime is 1962 and not 1963. Because 1964 is the year when "the music changed" (the narrative that the Beatles represented a New Age.) But 1963 was the year I became a radio addict and was listening intently to everything I could. I won't be around in 2033 to hear a flood of 1963 PD releases
BTW, going a little off topic for this brief moment, but when it comes to the PD in the US, in 2019, ALL movies from 1923 that had their copyrights renewed and have surviving prints will be in the public domain so Mill Creek and Echo Bridge will be able to copy over for example the 1923 silent Ten Commandments in their boxed sets, Alpha Video will be able to issue a DVD-R of that movie on oldies.com, etc. There'll be no recordings to be in the US PD at in 2019 obviously
This is exactly the point. Record companies still make huge money on tons of stuff from 1963 on forward.
Here's a new label I came across working in this domain, Gold Fish. They put out back in 2016 a very nice Scott Walker and the Walker Brothers' Osaka, Japan 1968 performance which they call Everything Under The Sun. That is easy to confuse with the complete box set of the same name.
The Hallmark CD of Bobby Boris Pickett's Monster Mash album is horrible sounding. Get it on either one of the PD vinyl issues sourced from the Deram CD, a decent and clean copy of the Garpax or Parrot LP or the Deram CD itself. I can describe the sound of the Hallmark CD as Brickwalled, muffled, and sourced from a noisy and worn LP.
The Real Gone UK PD label changed its name to Reel To Reel as people were long confusing the Real Gone PD label with Real Gone Music, the US company that licenses the masters.
I generally avoid these releases because I find them distasteful, but I made a rare exception and bought the CD below while I was in Paris last winter. Why? Because a.) it was cheap, and b.) because most of these recordings are hard to find otherwise. It's certainly not unlistenable, but it's not audiophile quality by any stretch of the imagination. It's mastered from worn South American LPs that were not probably pressed on very high quality vinyl to begin with. At least one of the tracks has a skip, transferred from the record.
Well when they kept getting orders for product that they don’t and cannot carry, never will carry - the hassle might have started to wear on them. Having to explain, no we are not that company - our catalog is (inferior) very different.
That is what these collections are good for - collecting a lot of music for a particular artist that is mostly out of print or hard to get otherwise. Strangely enough, I see some of these sets going for decent money on the used market because they are often the only complete collections on CD for certain acts.
And often these sets feature lovely mastering - in fact ripped from a major label’s released CDs. Sometimes a Bear Family or Mosaic type label has their work lifted right out from under them in a certain territory at least. I can’t imagine these labels bothering with needle drops unless they have to. But an interesting feature of the PD label sets is having albums of an artist that were controlled by two different companies. Some RCA albums with Reprise label releases included is not uncommon. I think it’s good that recorded works do not stay copyrighted forever in spite of what some corporations would have us to think.
This is probably a significant reasons why Mosaic is teetering on the edge of extinction right now. How can they compete? $100: $11:
I thought the whole point is that you get way more that you didn't really pay for. Diff perspectives.
