zinniabooklover
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I have no idea but that's the impression I get.It seems MJ's legacy is kind of a mess in comparison..?
I don't think so.Understatement?
Perhaps I'm being unfair but Prince has a vault which seems to be pretty well organised and ... er, Michael doesn't. Or doesn't seem to. Don't wanna slag off the likes of Matt Forger - who I absolutely adore - or any of Michael's studio team. He had an ace team working for him, they were geniuses. I love them to bits and being the archivist or person who organises the vault wouldn't be part of their duties, anyway. Someone mentioned Michael's personal assistant as having some responsibility for this but they would be so busy keeping on top of Michael's professional life and, no doubt, also helping him with aspects of his personal life. That's what PA's do. Organising the vault on top of all of that is a big ask, imo.With a proper, complete, maybe even digitalized database it would be so much easier to compile 'new' work and 'finish' demo's it would seem. We at least wouldn't have to rely on the producers to hear his music
Susan Rogers started off as an audio tech, Prince promoted her to sound engineer and she started the database bc he was always asking her to grab this or that tape so he could work on it. She didn't know where anything was, sounds like it was a bit disorganised and she decided to sort it out. Once she got the basics in place - including the database - she then started to call in master tapes. She was a music industry newbie, didn't know she wasn't supposed to ask for the masters since they belonged to the record company but apparently people sent them to her. And I think that's how it got started. I don't know who else worked on the vault but she seems to be the person who got it up and running, initially.
When I see quotes like this from Bruce Swedien I'm like,
"Although when I did Billie Jean I did 91 mixes of that thing ... I had a pile of half-inch tapes to the ceiling."
and I wanna know where those 91 tapes are. I'm not suggesting any of them could be used for any future project. But just to know they were safely documented and properly stored would be great.