RCA opens up vault for dance music

[V. Barbarino]

RCA opens up vault for dance music fans By Kerri Mason

Sun Apr 30, 10:53 PM ET

NEW YORK (Billboard) - If digital files are the new vinyl records, then term searching is the new crate digging. Background knowledge once helped collectors and connoisseurs plumb a local record store's stock. Now they might use it to pick the right keyword when they're online.

But even that know-how won't necessarily help them find the track they seek. "A year ago, I looked for (Odyssey's) 'Native New Yorker' on iTunes, and I couldn't find it," says Hosh Gureli, RCA Music Group vice president of A&R. "In fact, none of the classic (dance) stuff was up there." A lot of the material, Gureli's research soon revealed, was sitting in RCA's Pennsylvania storage facility, confined to dusty half-inch tapes.

Prompted by that experience and his idea that "dance music in general has gone digital quicker than other genres of music," Gureli started work on the project that would become the RCA Dance Vault.

The ambitious effort is bringing a feast of rarities to the modern corner record store, iTunes. The vault's initial offering has just come online and includes previously non-digitized, original dance classics ("Native New Yorker"), promo-only extended mixes (Eurythmics' 12-minute "Right by Your Side"), DJ tools like a cappellas and bonus beats and new material without any other feasible means of release (Joe Bermudez's remix of Kelly Clarkson's "Because of You").

The vault is part catalog capitalization and part crusade: There's money to be made, but not anytime soon. Gureli puts the average cost of digitally remastering each track at around $800. And that's not counting the effort and expense of researching the license information and uploading to iTunes.

"It's a labor of love," he says. "The return is not great, but it could be. And if it does start to show a profit, that's going to make a big statement for dance music, and it will, I think, get other labels interested" in doing the same thing.

Reuters/Billboard

[V. Barbarino]

800 bucks is a lot, hopefully they make their money back, by my calculations, they need to sell about 2000 copies of each track to break even. Not going to be easy..

[Guest coach]

800 bucks is a lot, hopefully they make their money back, by my calculations, they need to sell about 2000 copies of each track to break even. Not going to be easy..

This is not exactly true. By digitizing and remastering all of these, they also open them up to much easier licensing exploitation. But, even with that $800 isn't cheap. To be honest, seems a little steep to me.

[B-SIDE1414779017]

that # is a little inflated... :-\ if they already have masters it should be cheaper to covert that to digital.

+ easier licensing also means more remixes by modern DJ/Producers.. in addition to the online purchases.

Not to mention they can clear out all that storage space wich is most likely temperature controlled (and costs $ each year).

kudos RCA 8)

[V. Barbarino]

Bside, I highly doubt they will make their money back, this should have been done 2 years ago when edm was stronger, now those tracks will sit on itunes and rot.

[B-SIDE1414779017]

Bside, I highly doubt they will make their money back, this should have been done 2 years ago when edm was stronger, now those tracks will sit on itunes and rot.

True it should have been done years ago but better late than never... Look what happend to all of Sony & Columbia's Early Blues and Jazz recordings that were left to die in a vault... you can't recoup those losses ever