Database of Recorded American Music (DRAM)
DRAM is a subscription-based online resource providing on-demand, high-quality streaming access to over 8,000 essential recordings and their liner notes, album art, and other related collateral material. Designed primarily for use in an academic environment, DRAM facilitates the use of music in research for students and faculty across sixty-five campuses and gives scholarship philosophical priority in its approach to both collection development and intellectual property.
DRAM began as a project of New World Records, Inc. a not-for-profit recording label which has successfully maintained a very precise and distinctive mission for more than thirty years: to actively document and disseminate the work of American composers, selected solely based on artistic merit. Neglected by the commercial recording industry, whose primary motivation is to minimize risk to the profit margin, these are important compositions that would otherwise be seldom heard and narrowly accessible for listening or study.
New World Records, Inc. has its roots in an American bicentennial project of the Rockefeller Foundation, which established the label in 1974 explicitly to produce a 100 LP anthology illustrating the history of this country through its music. The repertory contained on the original discs was selected by a committee of historians, scholars and musicologists, and designed to encompass the broadest possible spectrum of musical genres. Along with the recordings, New World also commissioned liner notes by leading academics and subject-area specialists to give the music a historic and cultural context. The resulting 100 disc set was then distributed free of charge to thousands of academic and public libraries, both in American and abroad. The success of this effort was such that New World received continuing support for its mission in various forms, including library subscription and retail income in addition to foundation grants and individual donations. Such support permitted New World to continually solicit and record these important and marginalized works as an independent, not-for-profit label.
In 2000, as traditional venues for retail music distribution disappeared, New World Records began to look for new means to take this culturally significant music to a wider audience. DRAM was then created to alleviate New World’s dependency on consumerist whims in physical media and, in no small part, as a response to the evolving needs of its original core constituency—libraries. All throughout the music industry retail boom of the late 1980s and bust of the mid-1990s, libraries remained a stable segment of New World’s distribution base, with many maintaining standing orders for the label’s releases. But if the continued production of new, high-quality recordings of significant music was clearly still of value, so too was the improvement of access to these recordings: in discussion with librarians and musicologists it also became clear that, in an environment of highly restricted acquisition budgets and storage space, and of limited library staffing, ease of access increasingly vied with quality of material in determining the value of any resource.
It was in this environment that the idea for DRAM first took shape. The development and launch of the test-bed version of DRAM took place in partnership with New York University, with primary funding from The Andrew W. Mellon and Robert Sterling Clark Foundations. Over the past seven years, the service has experienced phenomenal growth in both the scope of its content and its user base. Though New World Records provided DRAM an expansive repertory (including concert and choral music, opera, sacred music, band music, jazz, traditional, folk, Native American music, popular songs and dances, and musical theater), it now includes recordings and liner notes from eleven other independent record labels (http://dram.nyu.edu/dram/_html/about/participation.html). Its users include students and faculty from sixty-five universities, with a subscription base that seems to grow daily. In response to this, New World is also taking various steps to move toward the next phase of its development. Plans for 2007 include moving the DRAM site to an independent, commercial-grade hosting service as well as re-architecting the technology to be more robust, adding numerous additional features such as:
- Flash media player custom-built into DRAM to circumvent firewall issues and allow more user control
- Rights Management “control center” for record labels who are hosting their content on DRAM, allowing them to manage the intellectual property rights and royalties
- Three affiliated internet radio stations to stream music whose legal restrictions do not allow for streaming on the traditional DRAM interface, including much hallmark content from New World’s original LP anthology
In 2006, the parent company of New World Records modified its name (from Recorded Anthology of American Music, Inc. to Anthology of Recorded Music, Inc. [ARM]) and charter in order to allow works from non-American composers to be included in DRAM. Though New World Records remains exclusively dedicated to the American composer, the ARM corporate mission has been expanded to permit the acquisition of online content from foreign sources and composers, so long as it satisfies the curatorial requirements of the collection.
Relevant Links:
DRAM: http://dram.nyu.edu
New World Records (recording branch of ARM): http://www.newworldrecords.org
