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March 29, 2024, 08:35:43 AM

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Billy Connolly Polydor albums - why no digital releases?

Started by PaulTMA, January 10, 2019, 11:40:38 PM

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PaulTMA

Having been brought up on the likes of Cop Yer Whack For This and Atlantic Bridge, as well as several badly-designed mixed-grab-bag compilation cassettes from other eras, I was very surprised to discover that none of The Big Yin's peak 70s albums from his Polydor years have seemingly ever been released on CD, let alone streaming services.  A quick consult of Discogs.com reveals this to be the case, which is rather bewildering to me as they must have sold rather well at the time.  Even a quick trip to Soulseek produces nothing but vinyl/cassette rips cobbled together from variable sources, full of indexing problems, wooshing digital artifact noises and the kind of mp3 glitches I've not heard since people were still saying wasssssssapp and purchasing CD singles records by Sonique and Black Legend.

I've had a quick search around an can't see any obvious answer for why this might be - unless of course some did come out briefly on CD and have not been listed on Discogs, although I can't find any evidence of any on eBay etc.  It would be nice to have some fuppin' pristine copies/rips of these, so beyond youtube and file sharing sites, are eBay and charity shops the only legal way to obtain these in 2018?  Seems rather strange, considering he's a bit popular.  Does anyone know why they remain out of print?

steveh

The original contracts would only have covered the formats that existed at the time and Billy or other rights holders involved may not have wanted to sign new ones for whatever reason or may no longer exist to do so.

NoSleep

There's lots of people selling those LPs very cheaply on Discogs. You could rip them yourself.

PaulTMA

Although I find it a bit of a chore, self-ripping can be done although with comedy I suspect it might take some of the fun away by turning the experience into something of a technical operation.  I just find it very strange that at least some point further down the line, say the 90s, that there were never any re-issues.  From what I can gather, only his 'Solo Concert' album (pre-Polydor) was given a straight CD reissue as late as 2006, with much of that era's material (the Transatlantic years) making up the bulk of these numerous crappy-looking compilations.  For someone of his stature, I simply would have assumed that there would be not only demand but whoever owned the rights would make an effort to return them to availability at some point, unless there's some kind of contractual hell going on, or if Connolly does indeed have any say but simply doesn't care, or has other reasons to leave them out of print.  All this recent talk of his mortality is making me wonder how his catalogue is going to be handled after he does eventually die.