Public Domain Radio

publicdomainradio.org

22 points·aimor··7 comments

I'm really interested in good audio from the radio days.

On Xmas my kids and I attempted to listen to the story of Ebenezer Scrooge and the audio we found was just awful, full of stereotypes, poor characters, ugly language. It was narrated by Vincent Price but despite a decent cast I was saddened to see it didn't stand the test of time.

Are there any good curated audio sources of freely available radio content? As a kid I remember such great stuff of the radio that my kids would surely love, but I'm not finding any of it on the internet of today.

OTRR is pretty good. I grabbed their X Minus One files off of archive.org and they're fantastic.

http://otrr.org

The archive website describes the project in more detail.

https://publicdomainpool.org/en/index.html

"The Swiss Foundation Public Domain owns about 70'000 shellac records. Many of these recordings are in the public domain. They are to be digitized and published for the benefit of all music lovers.

The inventory of the collection is being documented by photos of the labels of each record.

Some of the digitized tracks are published here."

This is great! Does simply owning the record give them the right to play/distribute the track? Or is it because they are out of copyright and in the public domain?

Unfortunately, whatever the laws in Switzerland, none of those are in the public domain in the US until January 1 2022. https://www.copyright.gov/music-modernization/pre1972-soundr...

So…in less than 100 hours?

The ones from before 1923 go public domain in less than 100 hours. The ones from 1923 go public domain in 2 years and 100 hours (there's an extra 1 year gap), then it's one year per year until you reach 1946, which has a 10 year gap.

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