Re: [ARSCLIST] Sony, BMG and the health of the music biz

[Don Cox <doncox@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello John

On 08/08/08, John Ross wrote:
> At  8/8/2008 04:01 AM, Tom Fine wrote:
>> There should be NOTHING out of print, anywhere in the world --
>> anything that's not viable as a manufactured CD should be sold
>> online.
> 
> Purely as a business proposition, reissuing archival material online 
> is probably a marginal enterprise. Just because there are master 
> tapes or metal parts in the warehouse, there are costs involved in 
> preparing the content for digital distribution -- and the owners of 
> the archives must expect to recover those expenses on very small 
> per-copy revenue. So there's some kind of relatively high minimum 
> sales volume needed to justify the effort. You can do it for Caruso 
> or Jimmie Rogers, but it's a lot harder to justify the expense for a 
> reissue of Mose Tapiero's ocarina solos.
> 
> Sure, there's plenty of unissued stuff out there that would probably 
> sell in decent numbers, but there's so much more, including much of 
> the vinyl and shellac on collectors' shelves, that might 
> realistically sell fewer than 100 copies worldwide. That might be 
> enough for some offshore shovelware producer to crank out a CD copied 
> from old LPs or 78s with no quality control, but it's probably not 
> enough for Sony, EMI or some other major archive to find the master, 
> perform a good transfer, and make a new digital master.
> 
But the point is that Sony and EMI consistently release bad transfers,
especially from 78s. Naxos, Marston, Dutton, and the half-dozen labels
that JRT Davies worked for all get better results.

> There's a reason that quality reissue labels like Mosaic and Bear 
> Family charge a lot more than the shovelware packages.

Mosaic charges more because of the elaborate packaging.

Regards
-- 
Don Cox
doncox@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx