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Posted: |
Sep 23, 2013 - 12:15 AM
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By: |
Wedge
(Member)
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From Doug Adams' blog, this past June:
1) The LOTR: Complete Recordings seem to be very hard to find right now. The Two Towers, in fact, is listed as being out of stock, and is going for astronomical amounts on the secondary market. Will they be back, and if so when?
I've actually enquired about this, but the short answer is, I do not know the answer. The Complete Recordings have always been tricky to keep track of. Shore's company has a say in them, Reprise (the label) has a say in them, Warner Bros (who owns Reprise) has a say, CAMI (who produces the Live to Projection shows) has some say in which way stock is pushed. I, however, have no say. Thus, I don't really have any right to demand information. I can -- and have -- asked the various labels involved about what's going on, but the answers I get back usually involve a lot of checking -- again because there are simply so many fingers in the pie. If I am given information to post, I promise to post it. Otherwise, it's safe to assume that I don't know any more than you do.
It's important to note that the Complete Recordings are a very high-end product aimed at a very specific audience. They're very expensive to produce, thus labels can't go and run off an extra hundred every time stock dips. I know it's easy to assume that record companies are all conspiring to take advantage of the consumer by creating scarcities -- or that they simply are content to ignore the fans -- but this isn't the case at all. When creating something like the Complete Recordings, a company generally has to produce a massive number of units just to make it worth their while. They're paying another company huge amounts of money to create the physical products -- and each commissioned run comes with a hefty price tag. If a company did a short run every few months, they'd lose huge amounts of money, and would never again back projects like this. For such investments to make sense, record companies have to do very large runs once every couple of years. There's never a guarantee when -- or if -- the next run will take place. The labels know far better than I how to judge such things. Presumably, The Two Towers is between print runs. (I don't know this for a fact -- they could have a thousand sitting in a warehouse for all I know.) The decision, therefore, becomes whether or not a new pressing makes financial sense. Past sales are considered along with presumed demand, logarithms, forecasts, politics, chaos theory, and who knows what else! The point is, they have ways of making these decisions, and no one outside of a small handful of people is ever entirely privy to them. I have a hard time imagining that The Two Towers is gone for good ...
http://www.musicoflotr.com/2013/06/the-great-unknowns.html
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Posted: |
Sep 23, 2013 - 2:35 PM
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By: |
SchiffyM
(Member)
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The most annoying thing to me is that these sets have continually been in short supply. Hell, they didn't have enough copies pressed for the first round of RotK back in 2007. How the powers-that-be seem unable to grasp how popular this music is I find most confusing.
How popular is this music?
Look, any way you slice it, this is a niche item. It may be successful as a niche item, but $50+ complete soundtracks (which include the moribund DVD-A format) are niche items. They are expensive to produce (as these things go) and unsold stock drains profits. No manufacturer of anything wants to be sitting on merchandise for any length of time. In this case, these sets are six, seven, and eight years old. I would expect (but don't know) that sales have dwindled. They may well plan to produce more -- maybe they're producing them now -- but I do understand that they cannot be perpetually in production, and that, especially as CD sales continue to shrink, producing more of these might not be a high priority for label (even if they would like to get them back into print).
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Posted: |
Sep 23, 2013 - 6:22 PM
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By: |
Mikal
(Member)
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Is the packaging really that elaborate or difficult? Strange that many complex Blu-ray and DVD sets come to market without difficulty.
Blu-rays and DVDs also sell much better than soundtracks when you're taking about the general populace, thus making any incipient financial risk more justifiable from the standpoint of production.
...they seem to have a better proportion of the good material to the banging/chanting/moaning tracks which give me headaches.
Moaning? Please, point out instances of that to me. The only example I can think of offhand, that even comes close to my conceptualization of moaning*, is Éowyn's lament at Théoden's funeral, on The Two Towers - The Complete Recordings.
*When I think of moaning, I tend to think of it in either a sexual or macabre context. In the case of the latter, i.e., musically, it rarely bothers me. But I'll tell you one cue featuring moaning that grates on me to no end: "Mourning Women" from Gabriel Yared's rejected score for Troy. *shudders*
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Posted: |
Sep 24, 2013 - 2:39 PM
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By: |
Gutenberg
(Member)
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Ok, everyone, thank you for your thoughts. I appreciate them. I went ahead and bought ROTK the other night, simply because I'd rather snag it now, just-in-case. 
I was never a massive "fan" of the soundtracks. I never thought before, nor do I now, "Oh, these soundtracks are 'awesome'! They are just so great. I will play them forever. I am such a fan." I don't consider them a "fun" score, not the way I would like How to Train Your Dragon or The Rocketeer or something else. I wouldn't describe them as "epic."
However, in the last year or two, they have grown significantly on me (probably because I finally saw the movies again for the first time in years). I have come to realise that this score is, I believe the film-score equivalent of "great literature." The entire score is, in reality, a 10-hour work of art of such depth and breadth as has been seen very few times (if ever) in the history of film scores. (Yes, there will be those who disagree. No problem.) They really do transcend anything I've ever heard before—even yes, the masterful works by John Williams.
And yes, I do genuinely enjoy listening to large portions of these scores, finally, after years of trying to. 
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