Golly. All this from a little post about money. You would think I touched on something sensitive. (Ok, bad joke.)
One thing some listeners don't seem to get though. The cost of manufacturing is NOT cheaper. Sure, ordering blank media has come down in price. But if I were a betting person I would bet no one would buy our discs if they were just blank.
It's like a book publishing friend once told me. He got asked why - when the cost of paper was only nominally more expensive today then it was 20 years ago - the books he was now buying were twice as expensive, three times as expensive even! So the publisher asked the reader to name a book he had purchased lately to cite an example. The reader stated he had just purchased the latest Stephen King novel. The publisher said "I rest my case."
The costs of getting a studio like Walt Disney to license and then locate and provide priceless vault materials is what has increased. It's the royalties that have increased. It's the mixing and editing and mastering costs that have increased. It's the per track fees going to the publishers that have (greatly) increased. It's the cost of the MUSIC that people are buying that has increased, not the blank media itself. Unless you want blank discs, you do have to accept that the costs of making CDs have gotten higher.
A little horn-tooting here, perhaps, but over these last 28 years, I have watched us go from the nearly impossible to the commonplace in getting soundtrack rights. We now work regularly with every major studio. Every one of them. And just about every minor one as well. Yes, getting the partnership with Walt Disney is probably our crowning achievement here. And having them - once a studio that kept it's doors closed to everyone - now willing to let us make CDs to Hocus Pocus, to say nothing of The Avengers or Toy Story 3 or Lone Ranger or whatever... well, it's certainly worth my continuing to chase down as much obscure and not-so-obscure film music just to make it available to you guys going forward, $20 per disc or not. To paraphrase General Patton referring to war in the movie Patton: "God, how I love it so."
Ok, I don't even know if my post made sense or not. But it was fun to write.
--Doug
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