For years, old recordings have piled up in the archives at Verve Records, including beloved jazz tracks that had no market big enough to justify pressing new discs. But thanks to the Internet, music lovers are rediscovering iconic titles like Ella Fitzgerald’s “Sunshine of Your Love” and Quincy Jones’s “Body Heat” — rekindling enough popular demand to prompt Verve to reissue them through a project called Verve Vault.
“The demand for music has never been as big as it is today. We get all kinds of questions from customers worldwide, looking for a track name or an album, or asking, ‘Why haven’t you put that out yet?’ ” said Jon Vanhala, vice president of new media and strategic marketing at Verve. So far, about 2,700 albums have been brought back through the Vault, with more than 5,000 scheduled to follow.
Because the Internet has changed how people discover and share music, the rules of marketing it and the hierarchy of who determines what’s hot have also changed. As radio-music listenership declines, the industry finds itself spending more time courting a broader field of tastemakers who, through Web sites, are popularizing songs that never get radio play. The primary tool in this transition is the playlist — a sequence of tracks posted on blogs or shared on music purchase sites such as iTunes.
“I listen to way more music than I ever have in my life,” said Robert Burke, a North Carolina quality assurance manager by day who spends nearly all of his free time searching through new music online, then compiling tracks in playlists with various themes, like rock songs that include a tuba, Top 20 bands from the 1980s with mullets, artists who sample riffs from Miles Davis, and so on.
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