Welcome to the New York Times podcast, you're crying like the baby in the background of music

news and criticism, I'm your host, John Caramacca.

It is September 2021, the Aliyah catalog or I should say the essential Aliyah albums are

now back on streaming services, it's hard to overstate how big of a whole Aliyah's

catalog has been in the streaming ecosystem and in this era where everything feels immediately

accessible, the idea that won an Emilion from 1996, Aliyah's self title from 2001, the

idea that those albums were not at all on streaming is at least in official capacity, it's a

little bit incomprehensible. There is a long twisted and tragic backstory as to why that has

been the case, Aliyah, as I'm sure you know, died in a plane crash 20 years ago and there has been

just a significant amount of family trauma and drama and split in control between the estate and

the ownership of the masters that has led to this kind of long gap. So what I want to do on this

week's episode is I want to talk about the backstory about why it took so long to get here and

we're going to do that with Gail Mitchell and Dan Rice from Billboard who interviewed Barry

Hankerson, Barry runs Black Ground Records, which is the record label that controlled the masters

to these Aliyah albums and has for the last two decades. So we're going to talk to Gail and Dan

first and then Naim Akakran is going to call in and we're going to go deep on Aliyah's musical

legacy and why these albums as music are standalone and important and I do want to say not every great

Aliyah song is on streaming. I do want to say justice for the super friends remix of Ari That's

Somebody, which was a bootleg. I know that's what I was referencing in the intro, but if anybody

sees fit to get that one officially cleared, I'd be very grateful to have it in a formal capacity.

But barring that, there's still a lot of great old music that you can now have easy access to.

So joining us today, it's Gail Mitchell and Dan Rice from Billboard. Hi guys, welcome to Popcast.

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