Our Pitch for the WGMC (World's Greatest Music Collection)
(by Craig Meyer, craig@reclaimmedia.com) (All Articles)
"WGMC" stands for The Word's Greatest Music Collection.
It consists of almost three million records (roughly half 33 rpm, half 45 rpm and a few 78 rpm) collected over the lifetime Paul Mahwhinney, a travelling salesman from Pittsburgh. Watch the two documentary videos about it!
He's trying to sell them on eBay, all at once, for a minimum required bid of at least three million dollars, but no one's buying. Sadly, it appears that "the marketplace" is waiting for Mr. Mahwhinney to give up on his goal of maintaining his collection's importance and significance by keeping it together in one place. Instead, there are plenty who will be happy to pick over the collection, pull out the 5-10% that are obviously resellable, and then send the rest to a landfill.
That would be tragic. Fully half of those records are brand new, and most were never published on CD. Their mastering tapes are long gone. So for most of those six million songs, those records in that basement in Pittsburgh are their very best remaining recordings left in existence. Once those records go, the songs go too.
By digitizing them, however, the WGMC can be made available to the whole world and even make a few bucks at the same time.
We propose to take a hi-def (96,000 sample/sec 24-bit) recording of each and every record, plus fine-print-legible multi-megapixel images of every surface: The records themselves, the jackets and every page of their booklets. When digitized in this way, there is no information (audio, printed or graphical) about the record that hasn't been digitally captured, and the vinyl record itself becomes secondary and redundant.
Reclaim Media is the only organization with the technology to accomplish this in a reasonable time frame (~5 years) and for less than $30M. We'll split off a non-profit wing of the company to do it if necessary.
Having this digital archive enables four key opportunities:
1: Google-style archive
Google is spending many millions annually to scan and digitally archive as many books and paper records as they can, even though they can't yet use them for any purposes (neither non-profit nor for-profit) due to present copyright law. This audio digitization and archival project might therefore be well aligned with their greater goal of capturing and eventually making available as much of human knowledge and art as possible.
The Google-style archive is just as legal as the other digitization work Google is doing. The law currently forbids them from openly sharing the music online, but could change in the future, at least for some cases.
2: Web-based library of MOST 20th century American music
This would be a better music library than that found in most music institutions. Plus, it would be a place into which others could "port" their music collections as well. It would make their own collections more accessible, not just internally but externally, to the whole world.
There are a couple ways the online music library could be made legal (besides a wholesale change in copyright law):
If the vinyl records are retained and not re-sold (thus forbidding opportunity #4 below), and if any single record can only be streamed (and not downloaded) online to just one subscriber at a time, then most inherent limitations of the record are retained. It's almost like playing the vinyl record "over the phone" to someone far away, only in high fidelity.
Another possibility is to simply charge and pay per-play royalties just like any other venue where music is played. A single and centralized online interface makes these millions of little transactions manageable.
3: iTunes conduit
This music was never digitized, but could be generating revenue on iTunes if it were. By digitizing it en masse, we can enable a web interface though which rights holders can "log in," certify that they own the rights to various songs, and then automatically have them packaged up for sale on iTunes. The resulting revenue streams would be split between the music archive and the rights holders. It's the "long tail" of music.
The iTunes conduit is perfectly legal. It doesn't sell music, but is simply a service that helps proper rights-holders sell their music.
4: Resale (via the ultimate online record store)
Mr. Mawhinney claims that the records are together worth $50M if the collection is broken up. He's trying to avoid that, though, because he wants to preserve his collection's significance by keeping it in one place. However, once the digital archive is ready, reselling the records becomes a real and honest opportunity within the WGMC's principles because the digital archive will remain intact. The archive can be split up and resold to potentially recover monetarily what it cost to digitize it in the first place!
Resale is legally compatible with each of the above opportunities but perhaps #2, as explained above.
Furthermore, this would be the ultimate online record store because customers could listen to the records online before buying them. Anyone with that infrastructure would probably become the de-facto fulfillment house for online vinyl record sales and thereby enjoy continuing revenue even after the WGMC is digitized and resold.
The above four opportunities are only possible if we fully digitize the WGMC. Just capturing their audio won't be enough. They must be fully captured photographically as well to make the digital archive complete. What's especially interesting about these prospects are that they can follow through on the WGMC's mission of helping our country remember its own culture while even being financially self-sustaining as well.
Back to article library.
