Rescuing songs that record labels forgot existed | Hacker News Reader

Rescuing songs that record labels forgot existed

bbc.co.uk

163 pointswalthamstow36 comments

I love music archivists, and there's an active bunch of them on reddit.

I remember this gem about a guy who had been searching for 15 years for a song that he had recorded off of Ian Camfield's XFM rock show.

https://old.reddit.com/r/NameThatSong/comments/58gt5d/ill_be...

After crowd-pooling the discernible lyrics, and a brief exchange with Ian Camfield himself (who had since relocated to the US), the search petered out.

Then one day, the artist themself just randomly uploaded the song.

Apparently they made a single debut, and then the lead singer went off to become a dentist.

I remember switching from Deezer to Spotify (paid subscriptions) because Deezer didn't have "Skunk Anansie - Hedonism (Just Because You Feel Good) (Allegedly Acoustic Mix)" which is an amazing song - imho one of the best "Repeat1" songs that I can listen for hours and hours.

There are other songs I cannot seem to find anywhere though, some cool remixes I remember from back-in-the-day or some live bootleg-y versions that never made it to the streaming services such as "Pearl Jam - Black/We Belong Together/It's OK (Pittsburgh '06)" (https://)www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1pG6cWzWOQ).

Another song that 'suffered' from stolen samples (seeing other peoples' comments), and a personal favorite is "The Orb - Fluffy Clouds" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Fluffy_Clouds). I remember hearing on an interview (many many years ago) that when they were discussing about clearing the stolen bits, someone said "say nothing and release it and we will figure it out later".

Little Fluffy Clouds was inspired by and famously used samples from minimalist composer Steve Reich's Electric Counterpoint (among others).

I think this is about where they sampled it from https://youtu.be/plL2VDAoThU?t=745

then sped it up for BPM and equalized out the bass frequencies

Reich apparently was so happy with it when he heard it he told his record company not to sue the Orb.

Reich is one of my favorite composers and is a somewhat unexpected "uncle" to the electronic music revolution. Upon reflection it's not entirely surprising with long repetitive rhythmic passages that are somehow absolutely electrifying. Once you hear his work you realize that his influence is all over modern music.

https://youtu.be/edKE10Yz_zs

https://youtu.be/ZXJWO2FQ16c

Some of the more popular songs like Sting's Desert Rose etc. seem to be collisions or shadowing where one version of a song is replaced by another (different) version/mix/edit of the same song (e.g. single vs. album version). This certainly seems to be a recurring issue with Apple Music. I wonder though if some editions such as promo versions or radio edits simply weren't released to the general public to begin with.

Some massive dance classics on this list; nice to see versions that bafflingly weren't on streaming. (Come to think of it I have lots of songs that sadly don't match properly on Apple Music - even some I purchased from the iTunes store.)

> radio edits weren't released to the general public

There's one good version and one bad version of Morrissey's Irish Blood, English Heart and for some reason only the bad version with added sound effects and tame ending is the one I keep finding on YouTube.

Several Michael Jackson songs are only on youtube in censored form, "They Don't Care About Us" is the one I remember.

There's a version of Space Cowboy by Jamiroquai that didn't pop up in any store for years. It's called Stoned Again, which in itself is an alteration and combination of the David Morales Classic Club Mix and the original music video version. For years until it was released on Apple Music the only versions you could get were the original, the Good Vibes Zone Extended Remix or the David Morales Classic Club Mix. I don't know if the shortened 3:23 long music video version's even available as audio only either.

There's an ongoing problem that's somewhat related where the newest release version of a song is the only one you can download. It's related to music rights and royalties, thus storefronts get talked into carrying a version that a different group of people can get money from. It's becoming a real problem because so many of these remasters do things like tape noise removal or leveling compression that severely unbalance the original mixes. Listening to ZZ Top's 2006 Fandango! remaster for example is unsettling because if you're used to the original 1975 release you notice right away the highhats getting reduced or the increased volume of the bass on what were originally live stage recorded songs. But many services do not have the original 1975 recordings or their 1988 digital transfers. If it weren't for preservationists doing manual transfers of well kept but now quickly degrading physical media and spreading them via piracy then all we would have would be these new remasters for a lot of songs.

a parallel problem I'm seeing is artists re-recording their hits in an attempt to have a second shot at making money after getting screwed by the record companies in the initial release. I can't blame the artists, of course, but my ear is trained to expect a very particular sequence of sounds and their re-recordings just don't cut it for me, despite their attempts to faithfully re-create every part of the original (other people appreciate music differently, thats fine).

> or leveling compression that severely unbalance the original mixes. Listening to ZZ Top's 2006 Fandango! remaster

Remasters from ~2003-2013 are terrible because they were mastered in part for listening on shitty iPod earbuds, since that was going to be a large slice of the listening experience for a lot of people.

Later on, as higher-end monitors became more popular, remastering flipped back to being (mostly) good.

This is also why a lot of audiophiles are still confused and keep repeating the “vinyl masters are better” ad nauseam. For that period they were. But before or after that time, a proper digital mastering was already better than vinyl due to the bigger available dynamic range.

I wonder what kind of weird contractual stuff makes Spotify have a totally different version of Limp Bizkit's "Getcha Groove On" than the one I remember from album. The one I remember can be found on YouTube though.

Hah, this made me check it at YT and read comments:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pvy3M5gQ_cQ

A reply to top comment explains:

> @AdrienArnouxComedy, 4 years ago Sample clearance issue. The beat is entirely lifted from here at 8:48 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPhr1Eg7iiM However there's no mention of a sample in the credits. I also can't find the name of this track anywhere. I did hear it in a cab once. So they probably stole it, got caught and settled out of court for physical copies. Now that it's all digital they would need to pay whoever they jacked it from again, so they'd rather put a remix instead. Here's a quote from Wes Borland in an old Kerrang I have from 2008 : "We actually got sued over this piece of s**. There was some sort of sample used in it that someone didnt get full clearance for, so we ended up getting into some serious trouble for a little while."

Sometimes I'll start listening to a favorite album in Spotify only to discover that the only version they have is censored. Given the option, virtually nobody would choose to listen to music that way.

Most disturbing was when I listened to what was explicitly (heh) marked as an explicit version of Eminem's My Name Is, but half the lines were from the "clean" version. Felt like being gaslighted.

Or they only have remastered versions when there can be big differences, not always for the best

Kids in the car?

I hate it especially when Bonus Tracks for limited editions of Albums disappear because the streaming services only list the regular releases.

I figured everyone used those to upsell the CDs/vinyls. I suspect TV show and movie commentary is almost exclusively left to DVDs and BluRays for that reason.

Yes, all this bonus content is sooner or later going to be lost in some sort of digital limbo.

I miss the DVD commentaries and don't understand why they aren't an optional audio track on streaming services. People liked those, right?

Similarly, I hate when the "secret song" from a CD is still a part of that track when on streaming -- which results in a song that is followed by minutes of silence before the 'hidden track' comes in. It makes it impossible to add it to playlists. (I'd assume this is an artist choice?)

That's kind of why it's a secret song.

When I do content ingestion for a major online music system, this shit would kill me. The hardest ones are the pre-gap ones that were before Track 1 on the CDs. Most of those are just going to be lost from legit services.

In theory I agree, in practice I've had far more annoyance from wanting to listen to an album on a streaming services and it's the "Deluxe Edition" which has a bunch of extra filler tracks I didn't want.

Or a b-side that has all live performances of the same album songs

> In fact, one survey by the US Library of Congress suggested that less than 20% of all recorded music was available on the internet.

Do they mean commercially? Public and private trackers fill much of this void

My favourite genre is demoscene (music from demos) which I think can only be found in generally playlist-able form on YT, but I haven't tried Spotify (nor trackers, assuming you mean torrents?) so I have no idea.. I'm sure there's loads on Spotify if you look (is second reality there? Probably I'm guessing).. but on YT it's the prod vids generally include the demo visuals too!

Ah didn't realise my 'Demoscene Forever' playlist is public[0]! Apologies it's only semi-ordered and all about my own interests of course but maybe fun to follow if you like the flavour? :)

[0] https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlerVIXy18-dSHxk4Gr_NeeWy...

Yes similar to me, which is hunting down 90s hiphop instrumentals, B sides and unreleased stuff which you can only find on YT with poor quality (and youtube EQs audio to make voices louder) or on torrent trackers. That plus non-remastered stuff, I've never been a fan of a lot of modern mastering.

I myself archive vinyl only LP's for arguably the most elite of the music trackers. The music industry should honestly be ashamed of themselves for neglecting so much good music from the past and a lot of times making it extremely hard for artists or management to digitize their catalogs due to greedy legal reasons.

They forgot, up until they could get money out of it of course.

It's almost like piracy has a useful purpose.

I couldn't say it better, what's the social purpose of those music conglomerates in this story? They don't even know exactly which rights they hold.

they make profits for shareholders.

> They don't even know exactly which rights they hold.

To be fair, having worked for a company that was dealing with music licensing and having to investigate how to put stuff into a coherent format ... I'm not entirely surprised. Things like Dave (Eurythmics) Stewart having 10[1] different names (because it'd been recorded differently by different companies / publishers / etc.) (but they all have to resolve to him), restrictions like "Europe but not Germany for the 1993 version of song Y", and the whole difference between mechanical, master, print, performance, sync licenses etc. Spent 4 months working closely with a licensing veteran but was still utterly baffled by the time I quit.

[1] I forget exactly how many but IIRC it was into double figures.

except that at least on torrent sites only the popular torrents stay alive. that's not helpful. what we really need is a digital library of congress, funded by taxes, where at least every publicly performed work should be uploaded. the internet archive is a good start, but they can only take stuff that they are allowed to. they should really be able to take everything and make it accessible for a fee and free once the copyright expires. the problem is that greed of the publishers prevents that, hence i think a mandatory system would be better.

Private trackers have incentives to seed poorly-seeded torrents, like discounted/free leeching or double seeding credits. Although I agree with the general sentiment.

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