De La Soul back catalogue free for 25 hours

[gerald wb]

Re: De La Soul back catalogue free for 25 hours

just a heads up u dont actually get a second email with gmail, its kind of hidden, under a promo tab

got the second e-mail yesterday, obviously there was a lot of interest (no, really? ;-)) so it took them some time to send out all the links.

[poults]

Re: De La Soul back catalogue free for 25 hours

De La Soul Gave Away Pirated Copies of Their Own Music | TorrentFreak

[Huggie Smiles]

Re: De La Soul back catalogue free for 25 hours

^^^ oops !

[chuckc]

Re: De La Soul back catalogue free for 25 hours

http://recode.net/2014/02/16/you-cant-buy-de-la-souls-music-on-the-web-so-how-did-the-band-give-it-away/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social

De La Soul gave its fans a pretty great Valentine’s Day present on Friday. Via a website, the pioneering hip-hop group gave away its entire six-album catalog, asking only for downloaders’ email addresses in return.
Free download promotions aren’t groundbreaking these days, but they’re still pretty cool. And De La Soul’s move was extra cool, because they were giving away something you couldn’t get — legally, at least — any other way: Almost all of the band’s music has been AWOL from download stores like iTunes and subscription services like Spotify, due to an odd licensing tangle involving Warner Music Group, the band’s old label.*
So how did De La Soul get the rights to give away music you can’t buy anywhere on the Web?
Maybe — probably — they didn’t.
A quick look at the metadata on the files the band distributed on Friday seems to indicate that many of them came from Rappalata, a Russian pirate site.



That’s not conclusive evidence. But it suggests that De La Soul got its digital files the same way anyone else gets digital De La Soul files these days — from someone who doesn’t have the rights to distribute them.
I’ve asked the band and their website operator for comment, but haven’t heard back. I’ve also asked Tom Silverman, who ran the Warner Music-owned Tommy Boy imprint the band was signed to for many years. And I asked Warner, which presumably still owns the master recordings. Crickets.
So in the absence of actual evidence, I’ll go ahead and speculate: What De La Soul did on Friday was a slightly different take on hip-hop’s mixtape tradition, where artists give away music that isn’t intended for sale as a promotional move. Which is more or less what they told Rolling Stone last week, minus the legal part.
The fact that this music has already been sold — and you can still buy it, in analog form — complicates things a bit. But the reason you’re not hearing squawking from Warner, for instance, is that it’s hard for Warner to argue that it’s losing any sales from the stunt, since you can’t buy the stuff online. If, say, Bruno Mars did the same thing, it would be a different story.
It’s a bummer that the band has to jump through all of these hurdles just to get their music out there (music that’s been blessed by the Library of Congress, by the way).
On the other hand, it says … something about the state of the music industry in 2014 that they can do this without raising a fuss. As far as I can tell, the giveaway went off without a hitch. And if anyone else is asking questions about the legality of the whole thing, that’s news to me. Which is refreshing!
And, of course, because it’s 2014, it’s easy enough to hear De La Soul on the Web, even if you can’t buy it that way. YouTube has all or just about all of their catalog available with a minimum of fuss. Here’s Buhloone Mindstate, their third album, and probably my favorite.

* I’ve watched this from afar for years, because 1) De La Soul’s first three albums are three of my all-time favorite albums, so I really would like to be able to repurchase them** and 2) checking to see if a music service had De La Soul has been a quick way for me to see if they’re using licensed music. The hang-up here, according to Tom Silverman, is Warner Music’s unwillingness or inability to clear the many samples that the band used.