Record companies forgot these songs existed. A man saved them

Twenty years ago, your music collection consisted of whatever CDs or records you could fit in your bedroom.

Now, anyone with an Internet connection has access to more music than they can listen to in a lifetime.

In October 2022, Apple Music boasted that its catalog had reached 100 million songs. Since then, an average of 120,000 new songs have been uploaded every day, bringing the current total to around 176 million songs.

But here’s the thing: there are still huge gaps.

You cannot stream Ray Charles’ 1977 album True To Life.

Charli XCX’s debut single, !Franchesckaar! it has been swallowed up by the digital void.

Most important of all, there is no way to hear the Christmas number one of 1993: Mr Blobby by Mr Blobby.

In fact, a study by the US Library of Congress suggested that less than 20% of all recorded music was available online.

Sometimes, those records are tied up in complex contractual agreements. De La Soul spent two decades cleaning up the samples on their debut album, 3 Feet High And Rising, before finally arriving on streaming services last year.

But hundreds of other songs are simply forgotten.

That’s where Rob Johnson comes in.

By day, he’s a 41-year-old working in business development for a London law firm. By night, he’s a music industry crusader – digging up obscure gems and persuading record companies to make them available online.

Over the past six years, he has been responsible for 725 releases, including songs from Sting, Cher and Annie Lennox, with a strong bias for late 90s pop acts such as Billie Piper, S Club and the A*Teens.

“I’ll admit it’s a very strange thing to do, but it gives people a lot of happiness, so why not?” he tells the BBC.

It all started in 2016, when he helped his friend Jan Johnston – a trance vocalist who has worked with Paul Oakenfold – to put her catalog online.

“A lot of her solo music wasn’t out there, simply because it was never a massive hit for the labels,” he recalls.

“So I said to her, ‘OK, this is a rabbit brain scheme, but why don’t we contact them and ask them a) do you still have it and b) can you release it?'”

With no experience in the industry, Johnson simply called the switchboards of the UK’s biggest record companies.

“I hate talking to strangers on the phone, but eventually I got through to the right people and they said, ‘Yeah, we’ll be happy to take it down.’

In passing, he suggested Warner Records upload some of Louise Redknapp’s old albums to capitalize on her appearance on Strictly Come Dancing.

“Good place,” was the reply.

That’s when he realized that this could become a full-time hobby.

“I had some momentum, so I got bullish and thought, ‘Why don’t I ask them to release more?'”

To convince labels, he had to prove he had a demand — so he created a Twitter account where fans could make requests, calling it Pop Music Activism.

Almost immediately, he was inundated with messages about Victoria Beckham’s debut single Out Of Your Mind.

“It was planned at the time, but a lot of pop fans looked back and thought, ‘That was a bit of fun,'” says Johnson.

After a few phone calls, he uploaded it in June 2018, by which time it had amassed 1.8 million streams on Spotify alone.

“The reaction was quite amusing,” he says. “You know how gay people can be over the top? They were like ‘Oh my God, this saved my life!’

“And it happened during Pride month, which was a little icing on the cake.”

Saving songs takes a lot of work. Contracts must be vetted, original recordings must be sourced, and streaming services require an array of metadata.

But when it works, artists are thrilled.

“Rob is incredible. What he has done for me, I would do anything for him,” says Maria Nayler.

Best known for Robert Miles’ 1996 hit single One And One, Nayler’s story is a classic tale of music industry misogyny.

After singing on dozens of trance anthems in the 1990s, she was signed to Kylie’s then-label, DeConstruction Records. But when the company discovered she was pregnant, it canceled her debut album.

“They went, ‘We’re not going to release any records while you’re pregnant. It has gone on the shelf until the baby is born.’

“Then, of course, nine months later, nothing happened.

“In this day and age, they would all be slaughtered, but in the 1990s I just accepted it.”

Johnson was a fan of Nayler’s song Naked and Sacred and reached out to her in 2018 to ask if she wanted help releasing her unreleased material.

“I was a bit like, ‘Who is this guy?'” she laughs, “but he knew more about my music than I did.”

It was a difficult project. DeConstruction was bought by BMG, then bought by Sony and eventually closed. No one was sure who owned Nayler’s master tapes.

“It was a nightmare,” she says. “Nobody wanted to talk to Rob.”

Of the options, they sent a general email to 75 people at Sony. Within two minutes, the archive team responded and agreed to track the music.

Nayler’s album, She, was finally released in January 2023. The following month, she goes on tour with dance producer Robert Gillies, who remixed Naked & Sacred for his next single.

“After all these years and all that hard work, I feel really, really happy,” she says.

It’s a similar story for Alexis Strum, who was signed to and left by two major record labels in the early 2000s.

She was left with two fully completed albums, recorded at a cost of £500,000, that were never released.

“Emotionally, it was huge,” she says. “It’s like having a painting that no one has ever seen, or a book that no one is allowed to read.”

Some of her unreleased songs were recorded by Kylie Minogue and Rachel Stevens, but a small group of dedicated fans clamored for the originals.

“Rob told me that people had been trading my demo CDs on eBay,” she says. “I didn’t even know anyone knew about me!”

With his help, Warner and Universal not only surrendered Strum’s masters, but agreed to pay off her debts.

Her biggest hit Cocoon recently hit 500,000 streams (“half a million more than Universal thought it would have”) and, as we speak, she’s back in the studio.

“I’m a mum and I used to work in IT, so it’s really weird to say, ‘I’m going to be a pop star’ again.

“It feels so ridiculous it’s actually believable.”

However, one person who would rather forget about their debut album is Adam Rickitt.

The former Coronation Street actor signed a six-album deal with Polydor in 1999, hoping to become the UK’s next teen idol.

“Let’s be honest, I had very little control over the creative side of it,” he laughs.

“They knew what audience I was targeting, and it was the gay audience, the pink pound and young teenage girls.”

His first single, I Breathe Again, was a massive hit, thanks in large part to a video featuring him in full ghost form, but when subsequent singles missed the top 10, both Polydor and Rickitt lost interest.

His album, Good Time, stalled at No. 41 and was, for years, unavailable online.

“I can totally see why I would have slipped through the net,” he laughs. “It’s not exactly like Burt Bacharach disappearing off the face of the earth.”

Unaware of Johnson’s campaign to revive the album, Rickitt was confused when it came back to life in 2018.

“The period of the album wasn’t my favorite, but if people still like it and find it entertaining, that’s great. I’m happy to be the retro kitsch guy,” he says.

“But taking me out of the equation, I think it’s a shame that record labels can decide what songs people can or can’t listen to.”

Johnson says there is nothing wrong with these decisions. Back catalog teams with limited resources will undoubtedly gravitate towards proven hit songs.

However, there are blind spots. For a long time, NSync’s single Girlfriend was grayed out on Spotify – with the label apparently unaware that the freely available version of the album was not the same as the Nelly and Neptunes remix of the hit.

“I picked it up with Sony US and now it’s getting millions of streams,” says Johnson

It takes a fan to spot these things. And Johnson, who devotes “two to four hours a week” to his project, has just the right mix of passion and kindness to nudge labels in the right direction.

“It makes the fans happy and gives the artists a sense of closure,” he says, “but it’s also a way to catalog the music for history.

“Whatever’s on Spotify now will migrate to the services we’ll be using in 10 years, whether it’s a chip in our head or whatever.”