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All of the mysterious titles of CD Baby origin on AllMusic

all of the non-UPC releases from cdbaby.com, you should show their provenance. In fact, you are PROBABLY the last other people with a physical cache of the medium and music to this extent. 

The beauty of the non-UPC releases is that there would be minimal legal issue if you set up an archive of it on archive.org. Granted, there will be a few stakeholders here and there that have probably created digital rights in the meantime. But most of them have simply moved on. They'd suck if they opposed such a wonderful archive anyhow. I'll throw some pennies at them if they fuss, literally.

I believe even the UPC-tied releases which have no digital legacy, would be minimal risk.

I would LOVE to work with you on this. I've done such a lot in this space, since around 2005 and it has gotten nowhere aside from other peoples' avarice or just not being able to commit for understandable reasons. I'm running out of fuel for the fire (i had to sell to gain - selling sort of spreads the word, so then there is less to gain and many others aren't archiving what they gained from me haha)

I'm not hard to find - am ox4productionz on youtube, college_of_rap_knowledge on Instagram & Mr.glmc on Discogs. Please reach out to me to discuss this. It would be great to at least kick start a conversation and put some thoughts together.Someone / some faction of your service at some point, must've had the physical copies as there are crisp 1080x1080 scans of cds, covers, back traycards for a fair few of these non-UPC CD Baby releases.

Their provenance is lost to the sands of time. I've "sort of" not shouted off the roof tops about it all but have certainly left breadcrumbs for years and had private lengthy conversations with people who have surrupticiously spread the word of these type of releases. There is absolutely a space for it. It'd likely feed in with that Jason Scott from Archive and we'd use your resource, mine, and at least half a dozen of the 20 or so people I know with a decent data supply of the physical medium too. 

I look forward to hearing from you.

Best regards

James Ware

2 replies

JW

Wow, the synchronisities are incredible. Whilst Just Plain Folks over in Indiana were in a bind and slowly trashing all theirs in 2015 (i mean, it was horrific what they were unindated with, and a shame of course) . Allmusic had found a home for theirs in MSU! Crazy. If only MSU would've known about JPF, they'd've had a much more robust archive. A messier one to sort out, but robust nonetheless.

Thank you for kindness sharing this. AI's attempts to figure it out made it sound bleak.  Humans to the rescue!! 

They've probably not been able to archive the medium quickly enough - I would speculate. Time is of the essence due to CD-R medium (a popular one for stakeholders selling via CD Baby) and it's known degradation. I think I spotted my first degraded CDR in 2010, which should show you why I highlight the issue.

There used to be a large physical archive of CDs on site, but those were donated to Michigan State University in 2015.

https://fortune.com/2015/10/23/rovi-donates-media-collection-to-michigan-state/ 

https://lib.msu.edu/collections/rovi