As of last month, some of the greatest recordings of old-time music are now available in a newfangled format. The Rounder Archive series, which opened its electronic doors at www.rounderarchive.com/ in late May, takes an innovative approach to selling music that might otherwise be overlooked in the commercial marketplace: whether new recordings or items culled from the Rounder, Zoe, Heartbeat, Philo, and Bullseye Blues vaults, all Rounder Archive titles will be available as downloadable digital files or as very-limited-edition CDs.

"With the shrinking space that's available for our deep catalogue in retail stores, we started trying to imagine the most effective and efficient way to get this music to our customers," explains Rounder vice-president Scott Billington, on the line from the company's Cambridge, Massachusetts, headquarters. "We've definitely had a good experience with the on-line sale of downloadable files through our various download partners, so we eventually came up with this idea of putting this stuff out for anybody who wants to offer it that way. But we'll also offer custom-made CDs for those people who would still rather buy the music in a jewel box with album artwork on it."

Billington-who, as Rounder's A&R director, is also responsible for signing high-profile Canadian acts like Jann Arden, Kathleen Edwards, and Gordon Downie to the U.S. imprint-adds that the project grew out of ongoing efforts to preserve the label's collection of original master recordings, some of which date back to the 1960s. "We've been making archives of our out-of-print albums for the past three or four years, just taking the original analogue tapes and using the best and highest-resolution digital converters that are available to make copies of these tapes, really just to keep them in good shape and make sure that they're going to be around for a while," he says. "So once we had a backlog of those-I think we have around 100 that have been archived in that way-the three Rounder owners and I sat down and looked at what we had and chose a fairly good cross-section of things from the catalogue for our initial set of releases."

The first 15 titles in the Archive series run from the old-time fiddling of the late Clark Kessinger to traditional music from Cape Breton courtesy of John L. MacDonald and Theresa Morrison to the Woodstock folk stylings of singer-guitarists Happy and Artie Traum. It's easy to see why artists like these aren't going to get racked at the Wal-Marts of the world, but it's just as easy to hear why Billington and his bosses think there's a place for them in the digital domain. There are real treasures in the Rounder vaults, and it's only mildly ironic that new technologies should be their salvation.

Of course, the company is not releasing these titles for purely altruistic reasons. The very nature of reissue projects is that they require a low initial investment, as the recording costs have already long since been paid for. By offering these titles through its own Web site, Rounder gets to keep a much larger percentage of the consumer's dollar. And the label has found several other ways to keep its costs down. The CDs, for instance, feature the original cover artwork but don't include any liner notes; that information is available in Adobe PDF form through the Rounder Archive Web site.

"We've also found a company to work with who will manufacture for us in very small runs," Billington adds. "So we're keeping a couple of hundred of each title on hand at the Rounder warehouse, but eventually we'll be able to order five or 10 of them at a time, if that's what the demand is. And there's a new process called SmartPrint which uses Adobe files as the master for the artwork, so we can print the covers here and they look almost as good as regular offset lithography."

So far, I've received about half of the first batch of Rounder Archive releases in CD form, and my only complaint is that the covers do look just a little washed-out. But the music itself is anything but diluted. Highlights include the Reverend Pearly Brown's It's a Mean Old World to Try to Live In, a delightfully bluesy collection of gospel standards from a Macon, Georgia, street singer, and Guy Van Duser's Stride Guitar, a fingerstyle classic from 1981 that still sounds fresh. The best of these "archival" releases, however, is a new recording. Minnesota All Stars: Great Accordion and Concertina Performances From the Northstar State is a rare look at a musical underground that manages to thrive despite-or perhaps because of-its isolation from the show-biz mainstream. Encompassing Irish, Scandinavian, Latin, and Eastern European styles, it's a raucous good time-and a perfect example of how Rounder's low-budget approach to high-tech music marketing will enrich our ears.