But the primary reason there are no extant Ray recordings is that Ray is an Allen fabrication. Funny thing, but this musician who never existed is looking smarter every day. He says he spends his workday with headphones on, listening to music. Apparently, the rest of the agency staff does this, too. The ad guy says the agency maintains a library of more than 1,500 songs in MP3 format on the agency's server.
Employees can program their workday from the playlist.
To the Recording Industry Association of America, this is hell come to Earth. I asked the guy if he knew which of the 1,500 songs on the server got there in violation of copyright laws. By the pause before he replied and the candid puzzlement in his expression, the guy clearly hadn't thought about it. It seems that we're headed to a new paradigm for the artist-consumer relationship that looks a lot like something Emmet Ray would understand. Assume that in the near future, any time a musician makes a recording, he or she cannot expect more royalties than what the sale of one copy brings.