- Music artists record a lot more music than the amount that gets released to the public; what does the record company do with them?

- Do they shelf it and let it collect dust? Do they keep some to release after the artist's death? Do they have storage for it?

I wish Death Row would release Dr Dre outtakes. Or off course Stevie Wonder outtakes 2, Crystall Ball II & shit. So many awesome things could be released.

the record companies do deals with artists for albums, its up to the artist to present an album that the record company will accept. if the outtakes arent part of the album they remain the artists. its not a case of all tracks recorded during the contract are the record companies property

its like you paying someone to paint you a picture, you dont own the other pictures the artist paints whilst making your picture

My understanding is, usually just the rights to specific albums are bought/owned by the company, and the "outtakes" from albums are stored in the artist's personal vault.

After an artist has passed, I don't think a record company can release stuff from the "vault" without the estate's cooperation.

- Ah, thank you Cinnie and unique

Cinnie said:

I'd tend to agree with that. It also boils down to how a contract is written. Some artists get really screwed over with EVERYTHING, others do not. But I would think if a song is recorded but never presented to the record company for an album, the company has no claim over it. IF that is true, that could be why Crystal Ball was put out w/ no WB involvement (to my knowledge). It was all stuff recorded, but never really released, while under the WB contract. IT's a sticky question, and depends artist to artist I think.

ernestsewell said:

-Ah, thank you

The employees of the label dub the songs onto shitty sounding cassettes and sell them as bootlegs.

Cinnie said:

This wouldn't explain the all too common practise of re-issuing albums as deluxe 2CD editions with unreleased tracks/takes. Hardly any artists have a say in what makes these deluxe track listings. All the recent Sly re-issues with previously unreleased tracks were done without his knowledge.

It goes into the record comany's vault. Unless an artist owns the right to their own music, it is property of the record comany to do with what they want with it (or nothing). This only applies to artists under contract.

ernestsewell said:

I think that was part of the reason why Good Love came out the way it did. he could not release the tune the same was it was recorded on Bright Lights because it would have been a violation of contract. he edited it and threw in the sounds so that it is indeed a different version altogether. Plus it was Out Of Print making it hard to track down for the casual Prince collector. I believe he thought it was doing us a favor.
[Edited 6/8/09 14:48pm]

paisleypark4 said:

He still thinks that.

Wowugotit said:

- Thank you

In terms of the Motown era, the recordings are owned by the label. Motown has a vault of thousands of unreleased recordings


In the case of Stevie, Prince, and MJ, they own their unreleased material

horses for courses. i buy a lot of the funk comps that come out, some track down the artists and pay nice royalties and some like the WB 'Funk Drops' series probably don't, WB have been buying record labels for years and they get all the tapes from those labels released or otherwise. they are sitting on a gold mine of material and they are going through all of their vaults and releasing compilations of various genres. I doubt the original artists get much! but at least they're not collecting dust and someone is trying to get this stuff out.



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