As many as 400,000 sound recordings published before 1923 entered the public domain in 2022. That means they can now be downloaded, remixed, or used in a soundtrack for free. This could be a boon to filmmakers and others on tight budgets who want to use recorded music in their projects.
There are some drawbacks, though. Being a century old means this music is dated and the recordings often lack the quality of today’s digital an even analog music. There’s also the fact that many of these tunes are from an era where racist language and stereotypes were considered acceptable in popular music.
Why are so many records being released from copyright protection at one time?
The answer is a law that was passed by Congress in 2018 called the Music Modernization Act. While things such as sheet music, photographs, and books were protected by federal copyrights, sound recordings made before 1972 were excluded and that meant they wouldn’t have become public domain for another 45 years. But the Congressional action changed all that.
All music published in 1926 and earlier is in the public domain and now all recordings from three years earlier have been added. While rock n’ roll fans, whose favorite genre didn’t show up until the 1950s, may not celebrate this recent development, blues, jazz, and opera enthusiasts will have a lot of titles to choose from.
For example, recordings of “Crazy Blues” and “Don’t Care Blues” performed by Mamie Smith and Her Jazz Hounds are now free to use. Performances from the operas Rigoletto, La Traviata, La Boheme, and Pagliacci are also included.
The list also includes numbers that have traveled well into the 21st Century such as “The Star-Spangled Banner” by The Sousa Band, and Billy Murray’s renditions of George M. Cohan’s “Give My Regards to Broadway,” “The Grand Old Flag,” as well as Irving Berlin’s “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.”
Because the copyright law treats musical compositions and recordings differently, in many cases the copyright on the compositions had expired long before the recordings. For example the popular fox trot “Who’s Sorry Now?” released in 1923 by the Happy Six is not in the public domain. The music composed by Ted Snyder and the lyrics written by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby are also free to anybody to perform or record. But the 1958 hit recording of that same song by singer Connie Francis is still under copyright protection.
Many of these recordings can be found in the Library of Congress’s National Jukebox collection. It offers a variety of popular music from that time as well as comedy bits, speeches, and readings.