It took me a while to notice this, but Percy Faith's "Hallelujah!" (aka "Music of Christmas, Volume 2") has been offered on iTunes since late last year.

Now, for the bad news...  It is not being offered as what I would consider to be a legitimate digital release.  It is being sold by Hallmark Records, a UK company that specializes in releasing albums that have fallen out of copyright.  In the UK, the copyright on sound recordings expires after 50 years.  (There is a proposal currently out there that would extend this period from 50 to 70 years in the UK).  In the US, it's a bit more complicated - but I'm pretty sure that no sound recordings currently under US copyright protection will be expiring prior to 2067 at the earliest.  Anyway, "Hallelujah!" was released in 1958 - so, you do the math!

The downside of material from Hallmark Records (and others like them) is that their source to release this music often becomes an LP.  With the recordings out of copyright, they are no longer obligated to license the music from the record company that holds the master tapes.  So they often rely on less than desirable source material.  I do not know what the source is for the version of "Hallelujah!" currently being offered on iTunes.  For all I know, it might be the 1997 CD remaster - though if I were Sony, I would call that illegal.

Here is the upside of stuff like this.  I am a big fan of Les Baxter, particularly his exotica stuff from Capitol Records in the 50s.  For a long time, iTunes was full of Hallmark releases of these 50+ year old Les Baxter albums - many of which had never been legitimately released on CD in their entirety.  It was clear that the Hallmark stuff on iTunes was ripped directly from vinyl, so I avoided it.  However, earlier this year all of those Hallmark releases on iTunes were replaced by Capitol releases of the same albums.  And the releases from Capitol clearly came from the tape vault.  I believe that had Hallmark not tried to make a little easy money on Capitol's efforts from the 50s, that Capitol would not have bothered making the downloads available themselves.  Perhaps something similar might happen in the future with Sony Music and this iTunes "Hallelujah!"

In the meantime, I am somebody who prefers to buy music as CDs rather than digital downloads - however I could see this as a valid alternative to paying $200 - $500 for the out-of-print CD.  If only it hadn't come from Hallmark Records, I actually might have downloaded it.