Perhaps you remember Del Shannon. He's the guy who sang "Runaway" ("and I wonder where she will stay, my little runaway, my run-run-run-run-runaway..."), which was a No. 1 hit in 1961 and was later used as the theme song for the '80s TV show Crime Story. Shannon had some ups and downs as a performer, but Tom Petty publicly got behind him and invited him to record an album, which resulted in the Petty-produced Drop Down and Get Me.
In the mid-'80s, Shannon recorded in Nashville for Warner Bros., taking a turn for the country. (Or returning to his roots, depending on how you look at it.) Warner Bros., for their part, were not impressed with the results, and never released the album. So Shannon simply gave the songs away to his fan club, a move that seems ahead of its time, in retrospect—add The Power of the Internet, and who knows what would have happened. But nothing did.
