Sub Terranean's Bandcamp gone?

[pdinklag]

I just noticed that Sub Terranean's Bandcamp (https://subterraneanrecords.bandcamp.com/) is completely gone, Google still finds it so it can't be too long. They had a LOT of oldschool releases, goa and other music genres. Does anybody know what might have happened?

[Anoebis]

Well, the same as most old school labels do: they just put old school stuff online without any rights. They just try, catch a lot of money untill an artists really makes problems... 

[pdinklag]

On 10/15/2021 at 9:43 AM, Anoebis said:

Well, the same as most old school labels do: they just put old school stuff online without any rights. They just try, catch a lot of money untill an artists really makes problems... 

Hm, damn. I intended to buy a few things there, didn't do so yet luckily.

The coming and going of artists/labels on Bandcamp is getting a bit annoying. If they're infringing copyrights, you won't legally own any music you buy from them and that really sucks. Luckily, at least German (and probably EU) law knows "good faith", so if you can't know about these infringements, you're all fine pretty much. But that's what got me a bit worried: Bandcamp simply allows artists/labels to completely disappear with no trace or note whatsoever. As a customer, you have no idea what happened (like in this case) and what potential consequences regarding ownership of bought releases might be.

This stuff is itching me to write Bandcamp support an e-mail and ask about it.

[Dolmot]

I just checked the link and right now there seems to be a small selection of compilations there. Let's see what happens next.

 

It's a tricky situation. The previous version was a treasure trove for an oldschool rave collector, but hardly for anyone else. Let's face it - next to no one would probably need 234 old rave compilations (many of them double albums) nor pay any really serious money for digital copies of them, but for about 200 euros/dollars the whole bundle was an impressive collection for archival purposes and in case that you wanted to check random bits from there. However, if the original licensing deals had expired:

• Maybe the artists don't see a penny of it.
• Then again, "a penny" would be the right ballpark estimate per track if you split the sum (minus fees, the label's share, taxes etc.) between, let's say, 4000 tracks in the bundle.
• And then, trying to re-negotiate the deals with everyone who had appeared on those albums over several decades would be a monumental task. I happen to know how tedious it can be to track down and to negotiate the licences even for a single track today with so many possible rightholders in different regions etc. Then just imagine the effort vs gain for thousands of them if it's basically just a tiny amount of oldschool hoarders who might ever buy this bundle (or parts of it).

So, is anyone going to make a lot of money from this? It would be awfully nice if the compilations with very little market value today would be just uploaded gradually to archive.org as public domain or offered as pay-what-you-want-for-charity or whatever, but even that would require a permission from everyone individually. In any case, such huge collections with diverse authors and little demand are largely stuck in a limbo. It's hard to see any way out from there that would be both realistic and legal.

 

I was kind of tempted to buy the whole shebang for the aforementioned reasons (basically packratting and occasional nostalgia/research) but never did because my hard disks are a disaster area and cannot handle hundreds of gigabytes with extra backups - which you always need with online stores that may vanish without a trace.

[HolyLight]

Their catalog is pretty damn epic. Certainly for Acid/Acid Trance/Dream Trance/Goa Trance. Big part of my teen years.  Too bad nothing ever lasts for ever. (Except maybe the universe).

I think their Cosmic Cubes compilation was my first ever exposure to Goa Trance. Or some other of their compilations which included all kinds of styles by todays subgenre-categorization. So it wasn't like I knew what the hell I was listening to. We probably thought it was all Acid. But there was certainly some tracks that stood out as different, in retrospect those were the more Goaish tunes.

[pdinklag]

This is completely nuts now. Yesterday all the Cosmic Cubes and Acid Flash compilations were back. Now it's down to just Vol 1 for those, but they added two volumes of Voyage into Trance. Not sure if they even know what they're doing - if anybody bought anything yesterday, it's gone from their collections again now.

I have just sent them a message via the Bandcamp contact form, let's see if I get a reply.

On 10/18/2021 at 12:52 AM, Dolmot said:

It would be awfully nice if the compilations with very little market value today would be just uploaded gradually to archive.org as public domain or offered as pay-what-you-want-for-charity or whatever, but even that would require a permission from everyone individually. In any case, such huge collections with diverse authors and little demand are largely stuck in a limbo. It's hard to see any way out from there that would be both realistic and legal.

This would be awesome, but copyright doesn't work that way unfortunately. For artists it's easy to put their own albums there, but labels would have to ask every single artist they released for their allowance, and that would get pretty complicated unless it was explicitly stated already in the initial contracts.