Hopefully, someone with some pull will suggest something along the
lines of this: if a recording is out of print for 5 years or more,
anyone may lease a digital master for a reasonable rate and reissue
the recording, paying a reasonable royalty to the copyright owner. I
wouldn't care so much about the long copyrights if material could be
kept in print. Since owners do not seem overly eager to keep more
obscure stuff in print, this would be a mechanism for them to actually
make more money from what they own and the public could enjoy a wider
variety of material. What shouldn't be the norm are userous "minimum
quantity" deals where someone wishing to license obscure material --
which, by its very nature, is not going to sell a ton of copies -- has
to front a large pile of money that he is unlikely to earn back. This
seems to be the biggest barrier keeping a lot of this material from
being licensed. At this point, there even exist already-amortized
digital masters of a lot of material because so much material once
available on CD is now out of print. In the classical and jazz genres
particularly, there is a surprising amount of material once available
on CD and long available on analog formats that is now out of print.
The general health of the music business does not bode well for much
of this material ending up back in print, except possibly as greatly
lower quality iTunes files.