For studio-based and popular musics, recordings—as much as scores—can function as urtexts (i.e. authoritative sources, cf. Somfai, 1981) because recording studio choices encode essential musical meanings (Danielsen, 2010; Zak, 2001). This short paper advances that claim through both philosophical argument and reporting of emerging insights from an in-progress case study of a collegiate ensemble that recreates culturally significant albums in full. Interviews, observations, and learning artifacts indicate that treating recordings as authoritative sources activates plural literacies: aural/embodied listening and transcription (Green, 2002), fluency with digital tools (Kuhn & Hein, 2021), and sociocultural/critical understandings of genre and authorship (Chen, 2019; Lam, 2024). In such an educational setting, students can engage in self-directed learning while instructors provide expert scaffolding to calibrate rigor and authenticity relative to their students' needs and abilities.Both extant literature on the ontology of musical text and the preliminary findings of my case study suggest that recording-as-urtext approaches uncover musical meanings that notation does not fully account for, including timbre (Gracyk, 1996), groove (Hosken, 2020), and spatialization (Moylan, 2014). However, aural forms of literacy need not displace notational literacy. Instead, they can support a framework in which notational, aural, technological, and sociocultural literacies work in concert. For music educators, portfolio-based assessment practices can further legitimate recordings as artifacts of learning and identity, while the ongoing formalization of popular music curricula fosters music production competencies (Coppes & Berkers, 2023).Positioning recordings as urtexts reframes reading to include active listening skills such as mix analysis and sound design. This raises practical questions: How can educators teach students to “read” a studio music recording's mix with the same critical depth expected for scores? What blend of literacies best serves diverse learners and contexts? And how can institutions equitably support teachers’ digital musicianship and infrastructure? In this paper I explicate how a recording-literate pedagogy can deepen listening and engagement, clarify standards for performance of studio-based musics, and foster a pluralist conception of musical literacy.