Idolator

Today's Los Angeles Times looks at the boost that digital music stores have given to one subset of artists left cold by current trends in brick-and-mortar music shopping—catalog artists, some of whom have had their records fall out of print over the years:

Businesses are hustling to cash in, buying old songs they hope will come back in vogue. Sacramento-based Digital Music Group Inc., for one, acquired the rights to distribute 335,000 tracks that had been owned by Chancellor Records.

Some of the master recordings are stored in a climate- controlled warehouse in North Hollywood. Some, such as the 1962 recording "Party Lights" by Claudine Clark, hadn't seen the light of day in decades. Digital Music Group converts the fragile reel-to-reel tapes to digital, salvaging disintegrating and corroded master recordings and preserving them, the company likes to say, forever.

Chairman Mitch Koulouris, a former Tower Records employee, said Digital Music Group was bringing new music to listeners when there was less and less room for CDs on the shelves of Wal-Mart and Best Buy.

"In many cases, these artists' life work has been locked up in a vault," Koulouris said. "Now, they get paid for every single download."

It's not just dusties that are seeing a new life (we were very stoked to find out that Pram's early catalog had been digitally reissued last week). But we just hope that this long-tail aspect of the new music business doesn't trip over itself—after all, the rate at which catalog replenishment is happening hasn't been affected by bandwidth and disk space constraints yet, and it's hard not to worry that when they do, these reissuers will have to make "will this move more than one unit?" decisions similar to the ones that the big-box retailers have to make on a regular basis.

On the Web, oldies are golden again [LAT]