They're Saying We're Not Worth Fifty Pound: Disappearing Songs on Streaming Services
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Something I’ve mentioned briefly in my past two letters is the danger of music on digital services (and streaming services in particular) suddenly disappearing, and being unable to be streamed any more. This hit home especially for me the other day as I went to listen to an old favourite tune, and one that I had put in a personal playlist previously, but found it missing.
The track in particular was Oi, by grime producer Platinum 45 & More Fire Crew, but mostly credited just to More Fire Crew once it featured on their album The More Fire Crew CV. It’s one of the first Grime tracks to really make an impact on the wider UK music scene, hitting number 8 in the charts back in 2002 and pre-dating Boy In Da Corner by a year or so. Certainly in the little corner of Suffolk I grew up in it was most of mine and my friends first introductions to Grime - we knew (and loved) UK Garage, but without pirate radio we relied on Channel U for this kind of stuff, and Oi was in pretty heavy rotation there. I’m not really the person to be writing about grime history (This book by Dan Hancox is the place to go for that) but Oi was a foundational track in grimes acceptance by the mainstream, and More Fire Crew were promptly signed to Go Beat (now a subsidiary of Universal) off the back of it.
It’s not just Grime this affects - loads of 90s jJungle & Garage records didn’t even make it to streaming services in the first place, and the same can be said of old house and techno too. This might be because of uncleared samples, or just because they never really made much of an impact in the first place. Luckily there’s a number of “genre archivists” on YouTube who upload old 12”s to YouTube so there’s a record of these tracks, and most things are on Discogs if you know what you’re looking for. I once had to archive and prepare for digital distribution a large UK Garage label catalogue and all it’s sublabels from a big box of DATs & 12”s - I remember adding some of these records to Discogs, but a good few of them still don’t have YouTube videos on the Discogs listing - essentially there’s no record of these tracks in the digital realm whatsoever, although the majority of them were bootlegs or unlicensed edits.
There’s a number of reasons a tune disappears from streaming services, the most common one is that the rights to it have expired - labels will sometimes only licence tracks for a set term and once that is up they’ll be able to re-licence it, or the rights will revert to the producers who may not have the ability (or the inclination) to put the track back on streaming services. More than once I’ve been asked by an artist to pull down an older work as it’s no longer representative of their sound.
One of my issues is that how do people find these tunes nowadays? Shazam is now owned by Apple and can’t identify a track unless it’s been delivered into the Apple Music ecosystem - this creates issues for artists and labels when trying to build a track in the clubs and may be wanting to make revisions based on DJ feedback - no one wants to delivered an unfinished master to DSPs, but if you think you’ve got a hit on your hands you’ll want to see that Shazam data to see if it’s resonating. If someone is hearing an old grime or garage record in a club for the first time and wanting to Shazam it then it just won’t be recognised unless it’s available for streaming on Apple Music - which often won’t be the case. There doesn’t seem to be any way around this, as far as I’m aware you can’t add a track to Shazam manually, which would be a useful tool for labels and artists to have. Another issue is that whilst a record may be uploaded to YouTube in WAV quality it will be compressed for video playback. YouTube-to-MP3 ripping services may claim to rip tracks in 320 or WAV, but they don’t, and legality of this aside, if you’re after a high-def file and can’t find a copy of the record you have no way to acquire it.
There doesn’t seem to be any real solution - DSPs can’t host material they don’t have the licence from the label or artist for, and if a rightsholder or artist wants a track to disappear then sadly it can, no matter how important or significant it is. That can be said of physical records too, things can get recalled from distributors and shops upon request, although it may be too late to stop a handful of copies finding their way out to the public - the most famous case of that was when A&M wanted all their copies of the Sex Pistols God Save The Queen to be destroyed, but someone managed to save a small number of them and they now sell for thousands of pounds on the rare occasion they surface. It’s a bit harder to erase all trace of a physical release though. Maybe this is just a temporary downtime for the song as it transfers from one distributor to another (a job that should be straightforward but often isn’t), but maybe it’s gone for good.
In this case all I can do is sit and wait and hope that someone, somewhere has the rights to Oi, and puts it back on streaming services soon. In the meantime I guess I’ll have to listen to a low quality rip on YouTube or dig the vinyl out from the shelves.
Twenty Jazz Flute Greats
On to this weeks music, obviously I can’t share any of the tracks I mentioned in the essay above as they’re not on Spotify, but I’ve shared a few cool things I’ve been listening to recently.
New stuff-wise the big one is the new ambient-jazz-flute album from Andre 3000. I’m not gonna lie I was a little unsure about this when I first heard about it (and maybe I still am after a couple of listens) but actually it’s pretty good. Does it have longevity? I dunno, will I go back to it after the initial hype dies down? I don’t know, it’s certainly a pleasant enough album and Andre 3000 is an amazing producer so we’ll see. There’s loads of great ambient albums out there (it felt like every techno producer made an ambient album a couple of years ago), and enough albums featuring flutes (including this one which I was instantly reminded of when I first read about Andre doing this) so this will have to be something special to stand out. Maybe it is (I’ve been listening to it again whilst writing this out and yeah, it’s actually growing on me).
There’s also a new MM/KM album on the Trilogy Tapes, it seems like ages since we’ve seen something from them, but worth checking out if you’re into that dubby, broken techno sound. The Hilary Woods album on Sacred Bones came out a couple of weeks ago, and I bought it purely on the strength of the Boomkat write up so if it sounds like a bit of you then you won’t be disappointed. I’ll write a bit more about this in a week or two I reckon, it’s really good.
Other new bits this week: I’m still going back to those Music for the Radical Xenomaniac compilations, and always finding something new there. That Theo Kottis tune is pretty cool, and Radio Slave has updated Audion’s classic Mouth To Mouth. There’s a new album from Tara Clerkin Trio which sits nicely with their previous stuff, maybe it’s a little lighter on the jazz this time.
You’re probably surprised to see Kylie & Robbie Williams in the playlist, but the topic of great remixes came up in the group chat the other day and my friend Josh reminded me of the Soulwax mix of Robbie Williams - it’s undeniably LARGE. That Scumfrog mix of Kylie too - come on, whatever your thoughts on pop music it’s a belter.
That era was a real golden era of remixes, I’ve shared this Deep Dish mix of Dido on my Instagram a few times as it’s amazing how they’ve turned what is a fairly bland middle-of-the-road song into an epic that just builds and builds. Another one who’s a real master of that is Four Tet - I don’t like all his music, but this remix of Born Ruffians I Need A Life (which came out on Warp, incidentally) I’ve always loved. I played it in the office the other day and my colleagues hated it, which is usually a good sign. In my eyes it’s probably the best thing he’s done. (The second best? That remix of Eric Prydz Opus, which again just grows and grows).
Whilst I’m on Eric Prydz - Pjanoo remains a banger to this day, and Woz Not Woz is one of my favourite house tracks from that era (full disclosure: I work for Cr2, the label that released Woz Not Woz back in 2004). Maybe not what you was expecting eh?
Until next week, thanks again for all the feedback and shares - keep it coming, please!