Vintage Content on Its Way to the iTunes Music Store

The iTunes Music Store is about to get a lot of content coming its way. Universal Music is digging deep into the vaults to release download-only recordings from the vast back catalogue. The company will digitize 100,000 out of print European recordings beginning with 3,000 albums from English, French and German artists such as Marianne Faithfull, Brian Auger and Brigitte Bardot.

"Over the next three to four years, we aim to reissue perhaps as many as 10,000 albums for downloading, which amounts to more than 100,000 tracks," said Barney Wragg, senior vice president of Universal Music Group International's eLabs division. "This programme will offer material that, in some cases, goes back to the early days of recorded music."

This music will be headed towards Universal's online music partners, and it is a rather landmark moment. Internet music stores are gaining more ground, and with infinite storage space, everything can be on display and a large portion of the sales come from the long tail of non-blockbusters.

This move follows Universal's digitizing all of its active catalogue, but digitizing back catalogue music can be rather complicated. Many of the recordings only appeared on vinyl LPs, and older contracts with musicians and publishers did not include digital rights. The ensuing mass of red-tape that goes into digitizing analogue tapes and vinyl into downloadable content should hopefully not prove to much of a delay.