"Sweet Dreams" - Air Supply

I have no idea as I have never been involved on that end of it (or been in the vaults to actually see the tapes and their labels.) That would be a good question to ask someone like Bill Inglot who collects tapes for many of the Rhino, Varese Sarabande and other labels' reissues (including many CDs I worked on.)

Todd Ireland wrote: Question for EdisonLite: In your experience, how good are record labels at marking their master tapes in such a way that indicates which specific versions of songs are on the tapes?

Hi All,

I've chatted with quite a few of the guys who've had vault access and with some fine folks who've worked for small reissue labels.
Answer to Todd's question above is: In general, not very good at all.
   Pretty much anything goes when someone actually enters these vaults and goes thru the tapes that are there. Sure sometimes things are clearly labeled and accurate. Often things are wrong, incomplete or not labeled at ALL. Also, sometimes what you are looking for is not in a "vault" at all. It might be in some producers basement. There are a million stories of tape mis-treatment, loss or carelessness.
Now, licensing has 2 phases, obtaining permission to issue a track and then "mechanical licensing" and that's the fee you pay for the label (or owner) to actually provide you with a copy of the track. Otherwise, you are on your own for finding a copy to reproduce, and that might be from a record. K-tel was a famous example of using records for their sources, as well as many others.
In recent decades, for major labels the copy that you are provided is whatever was dubbed for use in their "special products" division. They don't go vault diving every time - unless you pay $$ for someone to do that for you, and you best have a catalog or master# that they are to pull for you. Searching is time consuming and costly.
As for tape sources, the days of them dubbing off an actual tape for a licensee are long long ago. A digital a copy is quickly dubbed to a digital format (like DAT in early 90's and CDR in recent years) and you get that in the mail. You can request a version, but you may not get what you ask for. If they don't have you want handy, you may have to search other sources like vinyl and existing CD's and take from there. Even labels like Varese have to do this.
Larger labels like Rhino had more money to spend producing comps and therefore spend more to produce...so their mastering engineer can request a carefully dubbed tape from a specific master. (and even THEN they don't always get what they want.)
And! All of this gets even more complex when you speak of multi-label or things that were sub-licensed from other labels in other countries, then issued by a larger label here, and then distributed by a major. Well, chances are your single master is buried in that major's vault, but undisturbed because they no longer have anything to do with the licensing.
Well i ramble on, but i've sat glued with interest when some industry ol'-timers have shared story after story on this very subject. Fascinating stuff, and I assure you, it's NEVER as simple as i once thought it was.

Happy listening.
Mark M

Fascinating story, Mark!

The thing that aggravates me the most is finding the age old 'New stereo recordings by one or more of the original artists." K-Tel digitally is becoming well known for this, as has labels like Dominion etc.

GRRR!