[Wikipedia-l] Dream a little

Mon Nov 6 15:32:31 UTC 2006

If I had 100 million, I would use part of it to purchase the historical 
part (1898-1950) of the EMI Music Archives at Hayes, UK .  It contains 
about a million 78 rpm shellac records made in various parts of the world 
by various EMI labels (Gramophone, HMV, Zonophone, etc). Some of these 
recordings contain copyrighted musical works, but a lot of it is in public 
domain at least in the EU.  Most of them will never be published again, 
because there is no commercial market for, say, Icelandic or  Burmese 
records made in the 1920s, so EMI will just sit on them forever unless 
someone raises enough money to buy the lot.

The rest of the money would be needed to digitise the recordings and put 
them online. I 'll be glad to provide guidance on this, once we get this 
far...

Pekka Gronow
Helsinki, Finland