As part of a ruling slamming the recording industry for price gouging, said industry was supposed to donate many, many CDs for free to libraries and schools.
“Well, heck, guys,” you can just imagine some industry bigwig saying, “seems to me we’ve been paying a lot of money to warehouse a bunch of crap music nobody wants to buy. Sounds like a great solution to our problem, don’tcha think?“
Among them are the librarians at the Tacoma (Wash.) Public Library, who last week received a shipment of 1,325 CDs that included 57 copies of “Three Mo’ Tenors,” a 2001 recording featuring classically trained African American tenors Roderick Dixon, Thomas Young and Victor Trent Cook; 48 copies of country artist Mark Wills’ 2001 album “Loving Every Minute,” 47 copies of “Corridos de Primera Plana,” a greatest hits compilation by Los Tuscanes de Tijuana (2000); 39 copies of “Yolanda Adams Christmas” (2000); 37 copies of Michael Crawford’s “A Christmas Album” (1999) and 34 copies of the Bee Gees’ “This Is Where I Came In” (2001).
No doubt there’s a lot of demand every holiday season for Michael Crawford’s Christmas album. Ho, ho, ho.
“Not to disparage the artists represented, but I was pretty surprised by the numbers,” said librarian Lara Weigand, noting that the library system normally would stock no more than two copies of the most-popular titles at each of its 10 branches. “I didn’t know what the terms of the settlement were for schools and libraries, but I did not think that it was the intent that we would get more copies than we could use.”
Ya think?
The RIAA blames a “computer glitch” on the mess-up, and says it’s All Fixed Now. Libraries which have already received their shipments are busy contacting each other to see who needs their extra copies.
Yeah. That’ll learn those recording labels. You betcha.
(via BoingBoing)