Post #114997 by tikibars on Thu, Sep 16, 2004 2:45 PM

There is far too much here to go into in one post.

A REALLY short version:

First, you need to start a company, and all of the legal and financial stuff that goes with that.

You need to get a distribution deal so the CDs will make it to all the record stores and on line retailers.

You need a promotions department to get the word out, get press, advertise.

You need an art or graphic design department.

You need lawyers to work out the deals for licensing the music (and lots of other stuff).

Then - the music.

You need to find out who own the legal rights to any given recording.

You need to cut a deal with the owners of the material to release it on your label instead of their own.

Many times bigger labels won't see the value in more obscure recordings, and will give license, but since they are big companies, the fees are high. Smaller labels may be long out of business and impossible to track down.

There are also several people who need to be paid for the same song - the owners of the actual recording (usually the record label), the songwriters / owners of the publishing rights (or their estate), and the performers (or their estate).

Then you need to find the master tapes.

In many, many cases, master tapes are lost or destroyed. In many, many other cases they are damaged. Some older tapes are made of acetate and become brittle and unplayable. Newer tapes (post 1960s) are made of different materials, but become sticky and won't play back properly on the machines.

You'll need to find a professional archival recording specialist to rescue the tapes, if possible, and then someone to remix and/or remaster them.

So: IF you can get a license to release a recording that someone else owns, and IF you can find the tapes, and IF they are rescuable, then you're ready to press the CDs, send them to your distributor, and then get your promotions people on to selling them.

Now, interestingly enough, this is exactly what I have been spending the month of my life doing.

There's a guy called Jim Skafish who released two LPs for IRS Records in the early 1980s.

He has 53 reels of tapes going from the 1960s all the way to the present day, including the (pretty cool) first LP for IRS, the second LP that was unreleased because IRS felt it was too radical and weird, and the techno-pop record that was eventually released by IRS as his second LP (in place of the radical one). Plus tons and tons and tons of stuff he did before and after his IRS Records period.

I have been archiving all of this paterial into a high resolution digital format for him. Some of it will be released, and some not.

This has been an enormous task. I have been in Chicago's CRC studios (with Billy Corrigan in the studio next to us!) all month working on this stuff.

We have tapes in over a dozen different formats, depending on what years the various things were recorded. In some cases, machines to lay back the tapes weren't available, and we had to literally look all over the country for proper machines in good working order - sometimes unsuccessfully.

Many of the tapes were unplayable, and had to be 'baked' - literally put into a food dehydrator for 8 hours to make the magnetic particles on the tape re-adhere to the tape itself.

Thousands of Qtips were used cleaning tape machine heads. 500 gigabytes of hard disk storage were used.

All in all, a huge project, with many challenges. Now, Skafish is negotiating with record label lawers for the right to actually release some of his own music.

So: if you STILL want to do this project, I know a recording engineer with experience in preserving archival recordings (me!), but the rest of the battle is up to you!

over and out -