“Through the efforts of dedicated librarians, archivists and sound engineers, we have preserved hundreds of thousands of recordings that are stored on shellac resin, an obsolete and brittle medium.”
Sony and Universal are suing over the Great 78 Project, digitized shellac records that are 70 to 120 years old. The files keep the scratches and pops that modern remasters strip out. Each recording gets about one listener a month. The labels are not protecting a revenue stream. They are making sure nobody else gets to keep the history they abandoned.