Universal Music opens vaults for digital downloads

LONDON - Universal Music, the world's biggest record label, is digging deep into its vaults to release download-only recordings from its vast back catalog.
The company said on Wednesday it is embarking on a program to digitise 100,000 out of print 1European recordings, beginning with 3,000 British, French and German albums from artists such as Marianne Faithfull, Brian Auger and Brigitte Bardot.
"Over the next three to four years, we aim to reissue perhaps as many as 10,000 albums for downloading, which amounts to more than 100,000 tracks," said Barney Wragg, senior vice president of Universal Music Group International's eLabs division. "This program will offer material that, in some cases, goes back to the early days of recorded music."
The digitised songs, many of which have only been published on vinyl LPs, will then go to Universal's online music partners such as Apple's iTunes Music Store.
The new initiative -- carried out after Universal digitised all of its active catalog -- reflects the new reality of Internet music stores where "shelf space" is effectively infinite, and a large proportion of sales come from the long tail of non-blockbusters.
Dig
itising music, particularly back catalog recordings, can be complicated by the fact that older contracts with musicians and publishers did not include digital rights. That adds a tangle of red tape to the task of converting analog tapes or vinyl into a digital file that can played by a computer or a device like Apple's iPod.
Universal Music is owned by France's Vivendi Universal