[Dixielandjazz] Record Company Screw-ups

[Bert Brandsma]

Jazz artists didn't usually capitilize in record sales anyway. Often they were completely sold out of their rights for something like 20 dollar for a session.See Billy Holidays great record with Wilson.

Big record companies kept the big money themselves and made a lot of deals that were pretty unfair to the artists they said to represent.In fact they represented themselves and made slaves of many artists with exclusive deals that were not so good for the artists.At least the hot fives were lucky enough to have recorded a lot of original compositions, so they got composers rights years after they were made.But they had to fight for that as well. Take the daughter of Kid Ory who went to court for a hit based on Muskrat Ramble.The judge said that musically see was right, but was to late to claim and got nothing. Although that never was written in the law books.Later companies even started to buy out these composers rights as well.
Don't fight the internet, use it. Don't be like Don Quichot, fighting windmills.
I sold dozens of CDs and DVDs of our band thanks to youtube : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lcuLupqjmw
On the other hand, it is not unlikely that without the record industry, jazz history never would have been written.In classical music, people learned from studying scores.But how do you learn from some New Orleans improvising trumpet hero if you are unable to repeated listening to his masterworks?
Kind regards,
Bert Brandsma

> From: barbonestreet at earthlink.net
> Date: Tue, 23 Nov 2010 16:20:26 -0500
> Subject: [Dixielandjazz] Record Company Screw-ups
> CC: dixielandjazz at ml.islandnet.com
> To: mister_bertje at hotmail.com
> 
>  From Blended.com: (among their list of the 20 biggest record company  
> screw=ups of all time) For more of the list see: www.blender.com/lists/61239/20biggestrecordcompanyscrewupsofalltime.html?p=4
> 
> Cheers,
> Steve Barbone
> www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband
> 
> #17 Thomas Edison disses jazz, industry standards
> America’s most famous inventor, and the creator of the phonograph,  
> also had his own record label: National Phonograph Company, later  
> Edison Records. Naturally, it was the biggest one around at first but  
> made two fatal errors. One was that Edison Records worked only on  
> Edison’s players, while other manufacturers’ conformed to the industry  
> standard and worked interchangeably. The other was that Edison let his  
> personal taste govern Edison releases—and he hated jazz: “I always  
> play jazz records backwards,” he sniffed. “They sound better that  
> way.” So after releasing the world’s first jazz recording—Collins and  
> Harlan’s “That Funny Jas Band From Dixieland”—the company spurned the  
> craze in favor of waltzes and foxtrots. Edison Records folded in  
> October 1929.
> 
> By the way, listmates, to hear what is called the first jazz band to  
> record above, go to the below site and click on one of the various  
> blue colored links:
> 
> http://www.archive.org/details/fjasband1916
> 
> 
> #1 Major labels squash Napster
> Shawn Fanning’s file-sharing service attracted tens of millions of  
> users, but instead of trying to find a way to capitalize on it, the  
> Recording Industry Association of America rejected Napster’s billion- 
> dollar settlement offer and sued it out of existence in 2001.
> 
> Napster’s users didn’t just disappear. They scattered to hundreds of  
> alternative systems—and new technology has stayed three steps ahead of  
> the music business ever since. The labels’ campaign to stop their  
> music from being acquired for free across the Internet has been like  
> trying to cork a hurricane—upward of a billion files are swapped every  
> month on peer-to-peer networks.
> 
> Since Napster closed, “there’s been no decline in the rate of online  
> piracy,” says Eric Garland of media analysts BigChampagne, who logged  
> users of son-of-Napster peer-to-peer networks more than doubling  
> between 2002 and 2007. And that figure doubles again if you count  
> BitTorrent.
> 
> And while it pretty much finished jazz on any label, I can't help but  
> laugh at the suits at the majors, who should be flipping "burgs" for  
> their sheer stupidity!
> 
> 
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