Hi Scott,
I will not be killing my blog but just the MP3s. Unfortunately a music blog without music is still pretty much dead. Nonetheless, I´m far from being sick of this blog and I will continue to do it. It will just take some more time and effort to go by the ethics before I can post music again. It will take me on a whole new journey and I´m excited to go.
Some of the practical consequences of that route are still unclear to me though. My favorite records that I posted so far are private and budget releases.Finding some traces of people who initially privately released their own material should be a little easier. I suspect that they also hold the rights to their material. Tracing and contacting them will be a pleasure.
Budget releases should be more difficult. First I will have to give GEMA or BIEM a little money to release the material because they hold the copyrights, but I´m confident they don´t know anything about the true identities of the anonymous artists or the story of the defunct labels. It´s just some dead data buried deep down in their archive. None of the anonymous artists will see any money from them. But that´s just the first step. The true detective work will begin with gathering all information from books, archives, other collectors and contacting people who were close to the artists. Solving some of those puzzles would be really cool.
When I´m back I hope the blog will indeed be better.
Best wishes
Andreas