@PopMusicActivis, great effort!
Do we know anything about the seemingly random ONJ tracks that went missing? The most prominent of which is "Make a Move On Me." There is also "Soul Kiss," which represents the disgusting practice of making the hit single unavailable while the rest of the album is there.
Anyway, you should check out this thread with a compendium of missing 1980s Top 40 tracks. It's sort of a quest to get all the Billboard Hot 100 Top 40 hits of the decade available. Some progress has been made, but there have been big setbacks too. For example, Mick Jagger's solo albums were removed in October, and we have very little information as to why this happened or if we can expect them back. It has been a good three years or so that Eddy Grant's "Electric Avenue" was removed. It's not available for digital purchase anywhere either. It would be good to get some answers there.
https://community.spotify.com/t5/Content-Questions/80s-Top-10-Songs-Not-on-Spotify/td-p/4372301
I have been pretty good about updating, but I need to make another go of it. If you have the resources to look into some of these (especially those that had been available and have since been removed or those horrible examples of the hit single being unavailable while the rest of the album is available), that would be a worthy effort.
Some songs keep disappearing and reappearing. Johnny Lee's "Lookin' for Love" was removed from the main albums a while ago, but it keeps reappearing on compilations, then disappearing again. What is with the righs on that song?
Anyway, I have a feel good story about contacting the artist. For a long time, the only readily available version of Charlie Dore's "Pilot of the Airwaves" has been an inferior re-recording in a key a whole step lower. For a while last year, the original version with its parent album Where To Now appeared, licensed to Rdeg subsidiary Enterprise Music, but it disappeared again. On a whim, I sent a FB message to the Charlie Dore account inquiring about it (all her later albums are available), and she actually replied and said she would look into it! Not too long after that, the Where To Now album was made available again in full, now with an additional copyright to Island Records, the original label. What I don't know is if the re-recording is actually Charlie Dore's voice (I suspect not), but Spotify should remove it now that the original is available.
I was also able to get word from somebody directly connected to Barry Gibb about his album Now Voyager and its U.S. Top 40 single "Shine, Shine." It was available before the Bee Gees moved their catalog to Universal. It seems there is a conflict between Barry being licensed to Sony as a solo artist but to Universal as a Bee Gee. So they know something is up--whether they will actually do anything about making the album and its Top 40 single available I don't know.
Keep up the good work! It is needed. In an age where Taylor Swift, Def Leppard, Peter Gabriel, Bob Seger, and Prince are now available, it is becoming increasingly absurd to have any unavailability at all anymore.
As for my 1980s Top 40 list, perhaps a good place to start would be the two missing #1 hits: Irene Cara's "Flashdance...What a Feeling," along with its album that contains three other Top 40 hits, and Toni Basil's "Mickey." Then move to #2, where the most glaring problem is the aforementioned "Electric Avenue."
Staff / Moderator/ 3 years ago in Social & Random