The past week was a big one for the music industry: three of the summer's most anticipated albums hit stores Tuesday. Coldplay, Black Eyed Peas and the White Stripes dropped new releases amid a swirl of publicity and the high hopes of more than just fans. The triple-threat release underscored how the floundering recording industry operates today: by pouring major label resources into a handful of acts and praying for blockbuster returns. This is a year, after all, in which record sales are down around 8 percent from the same point last year.
"This is a hold-your-breath moment," says Richard Kurin, director of the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. But he's not among those executives turning blue. The Smithsonian Institution owns Folkways, one of several small record labels that has embraced the Internet in a way that major labels, which blame their woes on digital piracy, notoriously have not. "Humankind has made music ever since we were human," adds Kurin. "You don't want to restrict the sounds that people make or the ones they hear just because of their ability for them to be sold for tens of millions of dollars. It's insane!"
It is with that ethos that Kurin helped create Smithsonian Global Sound, which offers the Folkways collection for download at an online store. The project's official launch isn't until later this month, but fans of world, folk and old-timey music can find a treasure trove of tunes--for 99 cents a pop--at the Web site (smithsonianglobalsound.org). Already Kurin says the site is seeing up to 300 downloads a day. Of course, Folkways is not your average record label. The massive collection of field recordings, found sound and world music comprises an invaluable audible library--and includes some of the most seminal American music put to wax. Visitors to the Global Sound site can buy protest songs by Woody Guthrie, traditional Ghanaian drum jams or folks ditties from Norway. And attentive music fans who know that much has been made about the White Stripes' inclusion of a marimba song on their new album, "Get Behind Me Satan," ought to consider that a "marimba" search on the Global Sounds site delivers seven pages of results.
The Smithsonian isn't alone in seeing the digital light. Also putting back catalogs, archives and out-of-print obscurities up online are Rounder Records, Sun Records and Rhino Records. "We're basically opening up our archives, alternative takes, releases that weren't the hit version, and we're slowly putting that all online," says Sidney Singleton at Sun Records, the Memphis, Tenn., label founded in 1952 by Sam Phillips, who famously introduced the world to Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash and Roy Orbison, to name a few. At some point you may have heard of a little song called "Great Balls of Fire." Chances are, however, you've never heard the four or five alternative takes of that song that Jerry Lee Lewis burned through before cutting the more famous version. "When Sam recorded that stuff, he never erased the tape," says Singleton. "He didn't know for years that you could erase the tape." Phillips's charming lack of technical sophistication is our gain. Last month Sun Records began digitizing and gradually making available not only their hit singles, but also out-of-print rarities and outtakes of well-known songs to subscribers of eMusic (a competitor to Apple's iTunes and Microsoft's MSN Music), which specializes in independent labels.
Other labels have begun selling physical copies of long-unavailable records exclusively through their own Web sites. "Online delivery will be the way of the future for much specialized music," says Scott Billington of Rounder, which last week launched its Archive Series (rounderarchive.com). Around a quarter of the 4,000 titles that Rounder has put out since the roots label launched in 1970 are currently out of print. With the Rounder Archive series, fans of folk blues, jug band, Cape Breton fiddle and accordion dance music can log on to buy remastered recordings (and a few new titles for sale exclusively online). They even have a long-lost recording of an Allen Ginsburg reading. As with Global Sound, a trip to the Web site can be as much a learning experience as a listening experience, with liner notes and photos available for download in PDF format.
Rhino Records has a similar Web endeavor called Rhino Handmade (rhinohandmade.com), which creates limited editions of material that is either out of print or has simply never before been released. As with the Rounder and Folkways recordings, much of this stuff is simply too esoteric for conventional distribution outlets. But there are a few gems you can't find in any store, like, for example "Ray Charles In Concert." The two-disc compilation boasts a incendiary rendition of "What'd I Say," and a cover of Stevie Wonder's "Living for the City" so funky you'll wonder exactly what the fuss over 2004's milquetoast "Genius Loves Company" was all about.
For fans and scholars of even older music, the Library of Congress has put hundreds of songs, jingles, speeches and more on its site for free (memory.loc.gov/ammem). The library is also completing construction of a 415,000-square-foot new audio-visual conservation center in Culpeper, Va., that will be devoted to preserving and digitizing deteriorating old recordings and filmstrips. For the true niche specialist, the Arhoolie Foundation, an offshoot of the roots label Arhoolie Records, has teamed with the University of California, Los Angeles, to digitize and store 16,000 78rpm and thousands more vinyl recordings of Mexican and Mexican-American songs from the first half of the 20th century. The collection won't be fully restored until July, but fans of every conceivable genre of Mexican music can already visit the Web site (digital.library.ucla.edu/frontera) to hear 60-second snippets of old recordings, browse scans of the actual 78s and read notes on the performers. (Visitors to the UCLA campus can hear the songs in their entirety.)
And then, of course, there are the bloggers who--even if they provide insightful commentary along with MP3 copies of exceedingly rare 78s, wax and cylinder recordings--occupy a legal gray area. (Establishing ownership of a recording when both the singer and the label are long gone is to swim in murky waters.) Bearing that little caveat in mind, honkingduck.com, tinfoil.com and prewarblues.org are among the best of these. Peter Patnaik, whose prewarblues.org averages 1000 page views a day, argues that the folks who visit his site, which is of course for educational purposes only, are the types of people who actually buy music when it's readily available anyway.
For all the fire the recording industry breathes about the dangers the Internet poses to their survival, it's ironic that some of the oldest recordings are once again seeing the light of day thanks to new technology. "I look forward to the day where I will be able to download the most obscure record in the world," says Arhoolie's Tom Diamant. "Whether it's a recording done in 1908 in Central Asia or the hardest-to-find-in-the-world Louis Armstrong recording. I think that's where this is going." Still, there's nothing quite like listening to a scratchy 78 or feeling its heft in your hand. Just consider this the next best thing.