4. The Magic Number - De La Soul
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0irL1M15DH8 Even after some of the most notorious digital holdouts - like Led Zeppelin and AC/DC - relented and made their music available online, hip hop legends De La Soul remain a tragic hole in the Spotify catalogue. They did make their music available to download for free for 25 hours back in 2013, but whatever clearance issues made it difficult in the first place are still stopping classic album 3 Feet High And Rising from being streamable. It seems it all comes down to legal red tape, according to Posdnous:
Unfortunately, a lot of the earlier stuff we did on Tommy Boy , from what we understand, a lot of the legal language that needed to a part of the contracts between ourselves, the owners of the master and the publishing, I guess it didnt include the world of digital. It was almost specifically to vinyl, cassettes CDs. So a lot of those contracts needed to be reworked. So when dealing with that it took a lot is taking a lot of time to reach out to these different people."
A sure-fire way to make anything difficult: don't make it clear in a contract.