Typical Girls: Women in Punk/Post-Punk/Underground Music (Circa 1975-1980s)

["Mike Appelstein" <mike AT appelstein.com>]

See, I admit my own hypocrisy here as well.  I downloaded the BBC 
sessions, thereby taking $$ away from the copyright owner, and if I 
didn't have Demonstration Tapes, I'd have downloaded that too.  I'm 
enough of a Dolly Mixture fan that of course I'd buy the legit version, 
too.  I do think the situation here is different from the Desperate 
Bicycles.  If I understand correctly, the Deperate Bicycles have 
expressly refused *any* reissuing.  I think that opens up more of a 
case (albeit one that would not stand up in court) for sharing the 
music.  But Dolly Mixture has never shut the door on a reissue 
project.  Debsey, at least, has been approached more than once, and has 
never said no - in fact, she's been amenable to such a project for 
awhile.  I wish she, Rachel and Hester would work faster on getting it 
done.  But it's clear that at least some of the band members see some 
value in those old recordings.  I don't know.  I wonder if, rather than 
heighten their motivation to get a proper reissue off the ground, this 
would kill it entirely.

I don't know.  It's a thorny issue, and it's not if my hands are clean, 
either.  Maybe Slim or Erin or Jason, who've actually worked on such 
reissue projects, have some opinions?

-Mike

> I've debated both sides of this endlessly, but an
> interesting question is, does downloading kill the
> interest in reissuing? To a certain degree, I believe
> it does. Actually, not so much downloading, but
> bootlegging. I put it this way recently. Say we assume
> Dolly Mixture, if released on CD to no fanfare would
> sell 1,000 CDs. Now could we assume that if the label
> that released them really promoted the CD that perhaps
> they could get a bunch more sales by converting people
> through introducing them through press. Now if a Dolly
> Mixture bootleg came out, and all 1,000 fans bought
> the CD, could a small label justify releasing the CD,
> knowing the core market they could depend on may not
> exist? More specifically, I think I see this going on
> in dance music, regarding the oft-bootlegged
> italo-disco obscurities.
> 
> Am I guilty of this? I never bought the Silver Apples
> and Neu! legit CDs because I own the bootleg CDs. Is
> that wrong? Yes. 
> 
> Why do I mention all of this? Well, there's this
> little debate about the Desperate Bicycles that I
> almost didn't want to mention because I really want
> people to stop posting to that thread:
> 
> http://ilx.wh3rd.net/thread.php?msgid=5099830
> 
> Now, I know I can come accross the hypocrite in
> this/that debate, but if anything that reflects my own
> ambiguity about the entire situation, but also a
> knee-jerk reaction reflecting my own guilt seeing a
> Desperate Bicycles CD for sale on eBay/GEMM. In any
> case, I post this link because like, perhaps the
> debate in response to Mike's post has already taken
> place? 
> 
> dan
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