Music aficionado Jason Fry, one of two writers for the Wall St. Journal column Real Time, has been avidly tracking the development of the long tail in music recordings, watching to see how quickly low-demand items become available–with some frustration. One of the bright spots is the Verve Vault, but Jason explains that many publishing companies have too low a profile to benefit from quickly digitizing their old stuff. Myself, I’m interested in some old TV specials which never seem to come up, like the Richard Chamberlain performance of Christopher Fry’s The Lady’s Not for Burning. I wonder if people can help each other by starting wish lists and if some Web 2.0 service might compile those wish lists (hint, hint, hint) so connoisseurs could help each other surface some of these obscure items.

WSJ.com – Real Time: A Peek into Verve’s Vault by Jason Fry (subscription required)

Verve is a venerable label with a sterling reputation and a back catalog that’s a retrospective of jazz history: To jazz aficionados, knowing a title is an exclusive from Verve’s catalog is a draw in its own right. That gives the Vault instant cachet, but it also makes it a throwback in today’s music world, in which most labels’ identities have faded away to nothing, leaving the artist as the brand. (Quick: What label does U2 record for? 50 Cent? The Killers? OutKast?) Some labels — Blue Note, Motown, Def Jam, to name three — might be able to market exclusives on their strength of their own name alone, but few others could.