Thursday 11 February 2010

Will recorded heritage go the same way as chocolate?

"On an Overgrown Path" reports that "There is now a real possibility that [EMI] will breach its loan agreements at the end of March, causing control to pass to financial conglomerate Citigroup. Which means many of the great classical (and rock) recordings of the 20th century could be in the hands of American bankers".

In the case of rock and pop, the situation may not be quite so serious, in that the classic recordings of the 1960s will lose copyright in the next few years. The disappearance of many great orchestral recordings of later years, some of composers who had not had decent recordings before, is worrying, though.

1 comment:

Frank Little said...

It is not generally known that, in addition to its ground-breaking medical scanner, EMI had three of the earliest British computers to its name, the CP402, Emidec 1100 and Emidec 2400. The company even sold some 2400s abroad; to Spain or Portugal, I believe. The machine was noteworthy for having one of the first serious dot-matrix printers.

If EMI hadn't over-reached itself in America with the scanner and realised that the future of big businesses in recorded music was limited, it could have had a prosperous second life as a purely electronics company.