None of these are just business concerns. As they told Rolling Stone at the time, "We've been blessed to be in the Library of Congress, but we can't even have our music on iTunes." Likewise, there was an attempt in 2019 by Tommy Boy Records, which owns the rights to De La's music, to put them on streaming but the terms of that deal were so unfavorable to the group that public outrage forced Tommy Boy to abandon their plans. It got so bad that in 2014, the group put their entire catalog on their website to download for free for a day. What kept De La's tunes out of rotation was a frustrating morass of outdated contracts and record label parsimony. We now take for granted that our favorite artists have their catalogs readily available to us yet when in a time of grief over Trugoy's death, new and old fans were met with a deafening silence of options to revisit his musical legacy. When founding member Trugoy the Dove unexpectedly passed away last month, anyone seeking to revisit most of De La Soul's best known works would have been left empty-handed and confused. Despite this, almost all of their most important albums have been missing from (legal) streaming services. One of the giants of hip-hop's "golden era" of the late '80s through mid '90s, De La's penchant for playful creativity would go on to influence everyone from the Pharcyde to OutKast, Kanye West to Childish Gambino. For hip-hop fans, few omissions have been more grievous than the missing catalog of De La Soul. Streaming platforms were initially sold as an all-encompassing music library - every song at one's fingertips! - yet there are inevitable gaps within their discographies. Now legally available on the internet for the first time, we revisit the classic catalog and its restored legacy. De La's absence from streaming sites has effectively erased their presence from the contemporary musical landscape and threatened to minimize their historical import.
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