The Groove Music Life

Psst! Hey, kid! Want to buy the master tapes to an indie-rock classic?

CD Presents, the recently revived San Francisco-based independent label best known for the Rat Music For Rat People compilation albums, started 2010 by reissuing that compilation series as well as remastering several other albums in their back catalog and remixing full concert recordings of now-legendary punk bands that the early Rat Music albums were derived from. As the year winds down, the label put up a rather curious item for auction through their eBay account this afternoon: the master tapes to Billy Bragg’s second album Brewing Up With Billy Bragg.

So says their description on the webpage in question (written by CD Presents label head David Ferguson):

My record label, CD Presents, Ltd., proudly released Billy Bragg’s 1st 2 albums for the USA in 1985. These are the 2 [A & B sides] original analog production copies of the Master recording for USA release created in 1984. These recording tapes are only sold as “collectibles” and do not come with any “intellectual property rights.” Please note the Bill of Sale/Agreement included in the picture section. That document must be signed and returned to me via scanned email before I can ship your purchase. I can email you a signing/printout attachment upon sale.

This may be the case, but by all rights, CD Presents basically lost their rights to distribute this album and its predecessor, Life’s A Riot with Spy vs. Spy, when Billy Bragg signed with Elektra/WEA a few years later. Those rights have long since transferred back to Mr. Bragg, who currently licenses them to other indie labels (Yep Roc here in the US, for one).

However, CD Presents may be walking a slippery slope with this auction. Yes, the tapes (one for each side of the original LP) are a potential collector’s item. However, by all rights, the tapes should have been returned to Billy Bragg himself, who, thanks to his own internet presence, isn’t a hard man to get in contact with by any means – the contact page of his official website has not only e-mail addresses for every aspect of the electric folkie’s career, but snail mail addresses and phone numbers. And even though Mr. Ferguson is openly making any winning bidder of the tapes sign a document agreeing that the winner’s ownership only covers owning the actual tape and not the right to reproduce it, that is still no guarantee that any winning bidder would use the tape as a basis for their own pirate edition of a Brewing Up reissue.

On a related note, Mr. Bragg has been known to be a staunch defender of artist’s recording rights. A few years ago he had a dispute with MySpace over ambiguous language in their terms of service that made it appear that MySpace would be laying claim to any music posted on its pages (MySpace quickly rewrote that troublesome paragraph after the uproar went viral), and presently Mr. Bragg is a board member and key spokesman for the Featured Artists Coalition, a non-profit group devoted to protecting the rights of recording artists in a post-Napster music business. It would probably be no surprise to learn that he would be very displeased with the auctioning of one of his master recordings.

It also would probably not help CD Presents’ situation that at least some of the bands they once worked with have cried fowl over their reissue and live album release campaign. Flipper guitarist Ted Falconi openly criticized the label on his own Facebook page for releasing a Live at the Fillmore album without the band’s permission and inquired through Black Flag’s own Facebook page if they had been contacted by the label before their own live album came out. And another former CD Presents act, The Subhumans, reacted to what they considered to be an unauthorized reissue of their album Incorrect Thoughts (itself released by CD Presents the first time around, according to the band, without their permission and with several tracks released in mixes not authorized by the band in the first place) by rerecording the entire album and several unrecorded songs from the same period as the Same Thoughts, Different Day double album (Alternative Tentacles, 2010).

With all of that in mind, time will tell if there will be any legal hot water boiling in the wake of this auction. You be the judge as to whether it’s right to be selling someone else’s first-generation master tapes.

ETA: We e-mailed Billy Bragg’s management this afternoon regarding the auction of this tape. Their response? “We’re onto him.”

ETA #2: CD Presents’ Facebook page just announced another master tape from an expired album license on the auction block, for the Poison Girls’ Songs of Praise. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised if another former CD Presents release, D.O.A.’s Bloodied But Unbowed, ends up on eBay.

ETA #3: Someone addressed the topic of the tape sale to Mr. Bragg himself via his official Facebook page last night by asking if he’d pay the six-grand-plus for it and he responded, “No I wouldn’t. That’s not a master tape, it’s a cutting copy of the master which I still own. Technically, I own that tape too. Thanks for the tip-off. I’ll follow this up.”

ETA #4: Mr. Bragg posted a link to this story on his Facebook page, an unexpected but not unwelcomed move for which I am truly touched. He reports that he is “in touch with eBay regarding this issue.”