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Man it sure would be nice for Varese to put out a complete Deluxe Edition of Raksin's magnum opus on a 2 CD set (or license it out to another label like LLL...)
Yavar
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Man it sure would be nice for Varese to put out a complete Deluxe Edition of Raksin's magnum opus on a 2 CD set (or license it out to another label like LLL...)
Yavar
Sure would, and if they did and if someone issued it they would lose even more money than Varese did on it. Sadly, no one bought it, no one cared. And it would only be worse now.
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You may be right, but I don’t think it’s as simple as that... a 1000 copy limited release might fare better in terms of cost/benefit analysis than a wide release like Varese did in the 90s (even at the time, I’m sure a limited club release would have sold better than the wide release approach they took). After all, over the past decade we’ve had Hugo Friedhofer and Alfred Newman and Jerry Fielding scores sell out at 1000, 1500, sometimes even 2000 copies. I think the model has changed. Of course maybe costs have risen too much as well.
Yavar
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After all, over the past decade we’ve had Hugo Friedhofer and Alfred Newman and Jerry Fielding scores sell out at 1000, 1500, sometimes even 2000 copies. I think the model has changed.
Those times you are talking about here were about 8-10 years ago and are long over. We have lost so many Golden Age collectors in the meantime - you just have to listen to the Youtube podcast Lukas did several weeks ago where he said it quite openly what´s really going on behind the curtains regarding Goöden Age scores and collectors.
Therefore the model has indeeed changed again during the last 2-3 years in that even Kritzerland currently does mostly only 500 copy limited editions, not even 1000 copies anymore. And I suppose that nowadays - as unfortunate as it is - for FOREVER AMBER you would probably not sell more than 500 copies, if at all.
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You’re probably right Stefan... so since 500 copy releases are now a common thing (even with expansions — hello Music Box and Quartet!) can we all get on board with a 500 copy Varese DE of Raksin’s magnum opus, since the score already got recently restored for the Blu-Ray iso track anyway and that probably cuts down on costs?
Btw it was me asking live about more Andre Previn that caused Lukas to give that answer in his little Q&A. 
Yavar
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You mean the isolated score? Jeff in the third post above tells us the iso track is not at all complete.
Yavar
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Posted: |
Aug 28, 2019 - 11:37 AM
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By: |
panphoto
(Member)
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Sorry to hear Bruce so downbeat/realist - says much about the current film-music fan base.
A question for those in the know, the Varese CD was a compilation of suites from the score, not the OST. Or am I missing something here?
Echoing Rameau, it was a Golden Age in more ways than one while it lasted. Collecting scores from this era, if like me you are a benighted, Brexitised citizen of the UK it is no longer financially viable with the addition of VAT and PO handling fees. However, shipping charges aside, I believe there will come a time when, others, like many of us in the past, will be craving the music written when we were in nappies/daipers, or as in the present case not even born, more than the current simplistic retreads that so excite the younger collectors. They will get there in the end!
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I recall one of the label head, probably MV or Roger, saying a title really had to be at 1,000 units to profit off it. How some of these labels are doing 500 or less, I don't know.
Plus, even at 500 units, will a golden/silver age title still even sell? As MV said back in March:
Even when we mark them down 50% or even 75% people still don't buy.
MV
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One could probably listen to all the Golden Age soundtracks produced by that label, back-to-back, in a single afternoon.
https://wiki2.org/en/La-La_Land_Records#CD_releases
Interpreting "Golden Age" as *strictly* extending through the end of the 50s (they've done *so many* 60s and 70s releases by composers who got their start in the Golden Age such as Bernstein, Mancini, and North)...
Fantasy Film Music of George Pal 1958–74 Various artists
Godzilla (50th Anniversary Edition) 1954 Akira Ifukube
The Big Country 1958 Jerome Moross
A Certain Smile (2CD) 1958 Alfred Newman
The Robe (2CD) 1953 Alfred Newman
Wings 1927 J.S. Zamecnik
Shane 1953 Victor Young
Gunfight at the O.K. Corral 1957 Dimitri Tiomkin
Wild is the Wind (2CD) 1957 Dimitri Tiomkin
Man Hunt 1941 Alfred Newman
Giant (2CD) 1956 Dimitri Tiomkin
The Egyptian (2CD) 1954 Alfred Newman and Bernard Herrmann
Invasion of the Body Snatchers 1956 Carmen Dragon
Peyton Place / Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man (2CD) 1957/1962 Franz Waxman
Thunder Road: The Film Music of Jack Marshall 1958 Jack Marshall
The Bad Seed 1956 Alex North
The Day the Earth Stood Still 1951 Bernard Herrmann
All of that (with multiple two disc sets) would take you an afternoon of listening? 
I'm guessing you consider stuff like the numerous Les Baxter releases, Sawtell/Shefter's Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Ernest Gold's It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, and even the rather old-fashioned Doctor Dolittle musical to be Silver Age, right? Can the Tiomkin epics The Fall of the Roman Empire and 55 Days at Peking squeeze into your Golden Age category, seeing as they were early 60s and kind of the last gasp of that Golden Age genre?
Do I wish LLL found it feasible to do more Golden Age releases than they've done? Yes. Do I act like they have done almost nothing for the era? No. We know they have a premiere complete release of Alfred Newman's Diary of Anne Frank still coming up from them, too. What I'm most ticked off about is that they had two amazing complete Franz Waxman expansions in the works (Sayonara and The Spirit of St. Louis), and those both apparently got the kibosh in the recent Sony moratorium.  And of course they once had Dmitri Tiomkin's The Old Man and the Sea in the works but they hit some sort of rights issue on that and had to cancel it, too.
Personally, I'm hoping that the new Universal Heritage Collection bears some Golden Age fruit...
Yavar
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The Sony moratorium, the FOX halt, the WB price increases, the BYU high costs ... seems the list just keeps increasing.
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The Sony moratorium, the FOX halt, the WB price increases, the BYU high costs ... seems the list just keeps increasing.
...yeah things definitely aren't as good as they were a few years ago (or even one year ago).
Thankfully there are some rays of sunlight, like Paramount still going strong and Universal apparently opening up even more. There's still plenty in the available vaults left to concentrate on releasing for quite a few more years, I suspect, but it's sad for those of us with specific wants (i.e. complete Spirit of St. Louis or Sayonara by Waxman, or more recently for me, complete editions of Basil Poledouris's Lassie, Free Willy, and Free Willy 2...all Sony-owned).
Yavar
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I recall one of the label head, probably MV or Roger, saying a title really had to be at 1,000 units to profit off it. How some of these labels are doing 500 or less, I don't know.
You have to differentiate much more between the individual labels. Not all of them are working in the same way. Above all the smaller ones here in Europe are not really that much profit-oriented as you may think. I can tell you that at Alhambra or Saimel we would be more than happy to sell 500 copies of a CD. In most cases this is not possible at all with the older Italian scores which we issue and which only have a limited customer base of a few hundred collectors. So we are happy enough when we may break even with a title.
The bigger US labels mostly want to make a living out of producing soundtrack CDs whereas for the managers of some smaller ones this is not their main job, but only a sideline. It is therefore more a labor of love to release certain scores which they like themselves and which otherwise would not be released at all.
And you have to consider that such labels as Quartet and Music Box throughout a year always have a few bigger sellers among the titles they release which then also attract many US collectors (whom you need to really get a profit out of a CD production) and which compensate for some losses they may have had with other, more obscure French, Spanish or Italian titles limited to only 300 copies which simply don´t sell that well.
In addition, there are big dfferences betwen the licensing fees, pressing plant, mastering costs etc. in each country. You even see these big differences among US studios where WB or Universal are much more difficult to deal with than Paramount or MGM/UA and where licensing fees are certainly much more costly.
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I just looked at SAE & saw two 300 copy limited releases, both from Quartet.
This is nothing new at all and has becomme common practice throughout the last 2-3 years that most older Italian releases - even many French ones - are nowadays limited to 300 or 350 copies - with the exception of Morricone, particular genre cult titles or of course the Rota-Fellini scores which have a worldwide popularity. In most cases it would simply not be rewarding to make a 500 copy limited edition anymore because you really don´t sell so many copies. This is also the main reason why GDM in Italy stopped producing CDs with titles from their own or from the Italian RCA archive a few years ago - just not enough profit anymore for them.
A small anchor has been the vinyl renaissance in Europe, particularly for the Italian labels. Therefore they are now - in addition to CDs - also producing LP releases of their popular titles (also mostly with 300 copy limited editions) and this works for them.
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