MV Gerhard of La-La Land Records: "It's a harsh reality, but digital won"

[Jay 37,370]

When asked about the potential for future seasons of The Orville continuing to get physical CD editions from La-La Land Records, MV Gerhard said this:

 

"Seasons 1 and 2 sold very poorly. We are out of the Orville business regardless of what network it's on. Sadly, No one bought it."

 

and then

 

"I just want to clarify that we absolutely love and adore the show and it's music. The unfortunate thing is no one cares about cds for new TV shows or films anymore. From time to time we will do a CD release of a new project but the only reason we are still in business is because of titles like Field of Dreams or Xmen...Fiddler on the Roof or Star Trek. That's what consumers want on CD and/or vinyl...not the new stuff. Why pay $15 or $20 for a CD when you can just stream it for free because some asshole puts it up on YouTube or other sites like bittorrent? Or if you pay a few bucks a month for Spotify or Amazon you can literally stream all the new product you want for practically nothing. It's a harsh reality but digital won."

 

Discuss!

[Bespin 8,484]

Hey, there are still idiots like me who pays for Spotify AND for physical CDs!!!

 

But, I must admit... I love "older" or "expanded" releases, I'm not really into newer stuff...

 

Because like a good scotch or whisky... I prefer to wait 10 years or so before tasting a product...

 

If after 10 years, people are still talking about a score, well, it's maybe because it was good... 

 

Anyway, I simply can't follow all the new releases, so this is my way of consuming film music.

[Richard Penna 3,694]

I pay for Spotify and CDs too (well mostly digital purchases)! I use the former so much to discover new stuff, but I have to own the music.

 

And yep, digital is 100% the way to go for anything with relatively limited or uncertain appeal. I feel for LLL pressing CDs for new films or TV shows and possibly losing money as a result, but I firmly believe that's not where consumers are now. I happily pay £10 for a 2-hour digital album of a TV show score, knowing that no one's had to worry about manufacturing inventory that might not sell.

 

Honestly, this is why I find the no CD = no sale brigade at FSM so insufferable. There seems to be no consideration there that releasing niche scores on CD is costly and risky. They just demand their CD and fancy packaging.

 

The one caveat to that is a few months ago when I picked up all of the Game of Thrones albums, and got all but one on CD. The reason? In most if not all cases, digital was more expensive, as there are loads of second hand CDs floating around. In most cases I was just taking a copy off the hands of someone who didn't want it.

 

I do also buy CDs of my favourite non-film artists (Lana De Rey and Dua Lipa the top two) but LDR makes cassette tapes of her albums.... studios will make CDs for those albums long after the apocalypse because a f**k ton of people buy them.

 

Whereas I have flac downloads of all four seasons of Yellowstone and 1883 and I have zero desire to own any of them on CD.

[Holko 9,529]

Well there go our hopes of LLL going digital like Varese and Intrada.

[Richard Penna 3,694]

Yeah, that bit is disappointing. How do Varese even do their digital releases if the reuse fee structure is based on limited units? Or has that gone out the window now too?

[Jay 37,370]

3 minutes ago, Richard Penna said:

How do Varese even do their digital releases if the reuse fee structure is based on limited units? Or has that gone out the window now too?

 

Because Varese the same same label as the OST, already owning the rights.

 

In other words, Varese released the original score album for The Matrix, so they are the only entity with the music rights for that score.  They can fund expansions that license the unreleased music that wasn't on the OST from WB Pictures if they want to, and release it anyway they want.

 

For most score expansions though, it's a third party coming in that makes them happen at all.  For example, Intrada was the third party for Back To The Future II, licensing the music rights from UMG (because they inherited them when they absorbed MCA Records, who released the OST and had the music rights), the unreleased music from Universal Pictures, via a contract with both parties that stipulated they could sell X copies on physical CD - and that's it.

 

So that's why Varese's expansion of BTTF3 is on all digital platforms, but the BTTF 1 and 2 expansions are not.

 

So in other words, an entity like, say, Sony Classical, who released the Tintin OST, could very well choose to release a 2CD complete edition of that score, since they own the music rights, if they felt like hiring a producer to manage it, and felt like paying the AFM fees for the unreleased music.  It's just that these major labels don't really have anyone in them that care about film sore expansions (and when they do, they screw it up like Sony's Ghostbusters albums), while Varese absolutely has someone there who understands film score expansions and pursues them.

 

I hope that makes sense

[Smeltington 1,441]

I like CDs, but if our hobby is going to continue, then somehow, some way, it's eventually going to have to make the jump from relying on CD sales to becoming viable in the modern landscape. How it becomes viable, I don't know, but I hope it's soon. There are some recent releases I would have bought if they were available on digital retailers.

 

40 minutes ago, Bespin said:

But, I must admit... I love "older" or "expanded" releases, I'm not really into newer stuff...

 

 

All of us holdovers from the CD era are also holdovers from the Williams/Goldsmith/Horner/etc era, so there you go!

 

 

36 minutes ago, Richard Penna said:

In most if not all cases, digital was more expensive, as there are loads of second hand CDs floating around.

 

Seems like buying CDs brand new is often cheaper than buying lossless digital!

[Richard Penna 3,694]

  

17 minutes ago, Jay said:

I hope that makes sense

 

It does in the contractual sense, yep. I was just wondering still about whether the AFM reduced fees (or abolished fees) for older scores only applied to physical pressings, or is it that the newer policy made it such that pre-2005 scores don't attract those fees at all, so as you say, the owning label can do as they want?

 

4 minutes ago, Smeltington said:

Seems like buying CDs brand new is often cheaper than buying lossless digital!

 

It can be, yep, and that's partly why I still buy CDs.

[Jay 37,370]

Great question.  I dunno!

[1977 1,743]

I'm OK with new music being primarily on digital rather than physical. My favourite composers are all deceased (fortunately excluding my primary favourite JW) so they aren't getting any new releases (as in newly composed music) in any case. The handful of living composers whose music I collect (such as Silvestri, Newton Howard, McNeely) haven't really done anything in recent years that I would miss not having on CD. It's also probably because I don't really enjoy current filmmaking and gravitate toward stuff from the mid 70s - 90s when film music had it's 2nd orchestral heyday.

[bollemanneke 3,349]

I don't agree that people don't want new stuff on CD. I personally buy everything physically that has a personal, special meaning to me: classical, traditional or film music and movies/audiobooks. Never mind when it came out, but it absolutely HAS to have a very special place in my heart. I don't buy things that I just like anymore, I have to be blown away by it or it needs to carry sentimental value.

[Richard Penna 3,694]

I've bought a lot of new scores in the last few years, some of which were proper highlights, and some were just a pleasant background listen.

 

But in terms of format, I just go with whatever's cheapest and most accessible. If a CD is available and comparable in price, I'll go for that. If digital is easiest or the only option, then I go for that. The only time I have a reservation is if lossless is not an option. In that sense, buying from Amazon Digital is an absolute last resort if I can't find a single other retailer offering the album.

 

I still get a collector vibe from digital albums if they have some nice artwork (liners are next to meaningless for me) and the sound is good.

[Tom Guernsey 2,286]

I enjoy collecting all the speciality releases on CD, but as postage and import duties make it even more expensive (although I'm lucky as I don't have to pay tax on stuff I get sent to Guernsey), CDs become increasingly unviable for the consumer outside of the territory they're being sold as the record labels. As I've mentioned elsewhere, I buy almost all of my classical from Presto in lossless, which is almost always cheaper than the CD option, plus they provide a PDF of the liner notes which means you pretty much miss nothing aside from the box and the disc. The one thing I don't get is why new soundtrack albums on digital platforms are insanely expensive. A brand new classical release in lossless on the BIS label (which is not a budget label like, say, Naxos) on Presto is £8.13 whereas a brand new soundtrack album on 7Digital in lossless can often be £15... I mean the album for the David Tennant version of Around the World in 80 Days is £20 lossless and it's not even a long or double album being only 47 minutes long! Given that classical releases have to make all of their money from sales and soundtracks are just a bonus of music that's essentially already been paid for, it's quite frustrating that new release soundtracks are so expensive digitally and usually more than the CD. And yes, I know, reuse fees etc. cost too, although clearly producers are either less bothered or record non-AFM a lot given the length of some releases these days.

[Richard Penna 3,694]

I've noticed the skyrocketing cost of digital albums too. I was just listening to a Joseph Bishara score right now, which is £15 on 7Digital and the same to buy new on CD from some Amazon seller.... so it should be pretty obvious which one I just purchased.

 

A few other albums I got recently were unnaturally expensive, such as Don't Look Up. I wonder if the retailers feel they can charge more for scores from major, popular studios like Netflix, and/or are applying a 'new release' premium.

 

One I actually didn't bother buying was And Then There Were None, a BBC miniseries, which goes for £10 lossless for 23 minutes of music. If the composer really only wanted to put out that pathetic amount of music, go ahead, but that's a fiver's worth.

[Jurassic Shark 12,080]

2 hours ago, Jay said:

Why pay $15 or $20 for a CD when you can just stream it for free because some asshole puts it up on YouTube or other sites like bittorrent?

 

Too bad.

[Richard Penna 3,694]

27 minutes ago, Tom Guernsey said:

I mean the album for the David Tennant version of Around the World in 80 Days is £20 lossless and it's not even a long or double album being only 47 minutes long!

 

Actually that'll be because the flac option is 24 bit. If they had a 16-bit it would likely be about £10 or so. It's on Qobuz for a slightly more palatable £13.

[Datameister 2,044]

I don't find anything particularly surprising about these statements. CDs have been on a slow decline for some time. I can freely admit this, even though I still prefer to buy some stuff on CD. The majority of people in my circles are gravitating toward streaming. I prefer to curate my own high-quality collection of cherished music. The equation could change if my tastes were more mainstream, if I weren't too cheap for unlimited mobile data, or if I didn't care so much about compression.

[bruce marshall 1,315]

SPOTIFY is a disaster for the art and business of music.

They pay artists practically nothing compared to royalties from physical.

Real musicians will go extinct only to be replaced by autotuned non- entities.

We, the upholders of physical, are keeping real music alive.

Streamers have killed it off

 

[Bespin 8,484]

How they'll finance Mike Matessino remasterings if they don't sell CDs anymore?

[bruce marshall 1,315]

Do classical recordings outsell digital?

[SilverTrumpet 638]

The older titles do well because they've already proven themselves. Nobody's buying a Field of Themes or an X-Men because they're curious if it's good or not. It's because people have heard it already and love it and are finally ready to invest in a nice set. They're WILLING to invest because it's not risky for them at this point. New scores don't have that luxury. 

[Jay 37,370]

38 minutes ago, Bespin said:

How they'll finance Mike Matessino remasterings if they don't sell CDs anymore?

 

MV's post is only talking about OST albums for new media. 

 

Restorations of old scores on physical CDs are still selling fine. 

[Bespin 8,484]

Don't scare me like that anymore!!!

[ManofDestiny 71]

I buy digital music because there is no more space to keep CDs anymore.

Also, many digital version is HiRes version, sounds better I think.

And some new score has only digital version, so I have no chose.

 

But I still buy CDs if they are very special, or box set.

Because they looks awesome.

For example, I buy both digital and CD of Godzilla VS Kong, because it has HiRes version, and the CD looks great together with all the others Godzilla's CD.

 

But I only buy HiRes version of Wonder Woman and Dune, not only because sounds better, but also the CD version is actually CDRs.

 

[bruce marshall 1,315]

Thankfully LLL released that excellent collection for ....PHILIP DICK.

Looks like the last of its kind😞

[Koray Savas 2,251]

CDs are becoming less and less interesting to me.

 

Apple Music has everything in lossless now. Rarely a need to buy anything new. 

[Arpy 4,145]

It's alright guys, new films and shows will become old eventually, meaning it's not unreasonable to think fifty years from now there will be new consumers who want expanded and restored scores of The Orville or Ozark or whatever...

[bruce marshall 1,315]

2 hours ago, Koray Savas said:

CDs are becoming less and less interesting to me.

 

Apple Music has everything in lossless now. Rarely a need to buy anything new. 

So you like having two or three companies controlling what we see and hear?😗

[Raiders of the SoundtrArk 2,433]

I personnaly never purchase anything digitally and prefer to stick with CDs even though it's becoming more expensive with the prohibitive shipping costs.

I think shipping costs/taxes are an even bigger issue than digital, I mean when you're out of the US they can cost as much as the CD or even more and therefore you consume less CDs and than prefer digital purchase or youtube free playlist

 

 

[Indianagirl 298]

I don't like anything about streaming. Music or Video. I prefer to own things. Now I will sometimes purchase music digitally but I prefer to own the CD. 

[bruce marshall 1,315]

DVDs are still being made.

Why not CDs?

[Arpy 4,145]

Because many people still own devices that play DVDs. A great deal of new releases are combo packaged with DVD disc, Blu Ray disc and Digital download. 

 

 

[1977 1,743]

Also forgot to mention - lossy downloads are way cheaper in my territory, for example I regret buying Air Force One: DE on CD before Varese started releasing their DEs on digital. The lossy download costs a quarter of what I spent. It's also nice to be able to pick up out of print titles that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive on the secondary market e.g. Intrada's Rocketeer or Varese's The 'Burbs: DE.

[Nemesis 245]

I was one of the few who bought it. Still enjoying it.  Too bad they won't release any new music of the show...

 

 

[Richard Penna 3,694]

8 hours ago, bruce marshall said:

DVDs are still being made.

Why not CDs?

 

I suspect that there's no realistic middle ground with video in most cases (especially HD) - either you stream it, or you need a physical disc. There's just too much data to make a download a viable alternative.

 

Plus Arpy's point as well.

 

I'll also clarify that I would never rely just on streaming for music. I have to be able to download lossless files which I then keep on multiple hard drives.

[Manakin Skywalker 4,897]

3 hours ago, Nemesis said:

I was one of the few who bought it. Still enjoying it.  Too bad they won't release any new music of the show...

 

 

 

Yeah I'm kinda bummed I won't be able to get a signed copy of Season 3 to go with my other two. 

[Bryant Burnette 654]

My last couple of cars have not had CD players, and since that's the primary time during which I listen to music, my desire to buy new CDs has practically vanished.  The only reliable exception: John Williams stuff.  I've got a nice collection of his work going, and have no intention of letting that change.

[Drawgoon 100]

I know this might sound terribly pessimistic, but I am more worried about a not-so-distant future where every interaction we have with technology becomes a streaming service - not just music and videos.

 

It is already evident that tech giants are pushing hard for online storage to replace traditional on-premise hard drives/SSDs.

 

Many apps and software are becoming web apps too. Office suites have been available that way for some time (our very own Jay shares all his analysis stuff on Google Sheets, doesn't he?). I have seen many specialized software going that way too.

 

There is also streaming video games now. And I am talking about games people play, not videos of people playing games.

 

Not sure if there will be room for CDs on our minds if and when the above becomes the new norm.

[Tom Guernsey 2,286]

On 04/02/2022 at 11:01 PM, Richard Penna said:

 

Actually that'll be because the flac option is 24 bit. If they had a 16-bit it would likely be about £10 or so. It's on Qobuz for a slightly more palatable £13.

Fair, except that there doesn't seem to be a 16 bit version (the only alternative is 320k mp3) and based on their usual pricing of new releases, it would be £16 for 16 bit, which I still think is a lot. I concede that often 7Digital offer a CD quality FLAC for much closer to the mp3 price, but usually only on older things (and not always in that case). Funnily enough, there is a Billy Goldenberg score an older version of ATWI80D (staring Sam Neill - is the music any good?!) which is £8.49 for mp3 and £9.99 for 16 bit FLAC, which as a much more reasonable increment. So yeah, for this new score, they basically figured, "it's Hans Zimmer, let's charge a shit ton for 24 bit..."

 

Also, is it actually more expensive to make a 24 bit version? Surely they just take the mix provided by the producer and use software to convert it into FLAC/mp3 at whatever bit rate they choose? OK, 24 bit files will take up a bit more space but I can't believe it's 1/3 more expensive to host than 16 bit or twice as much as mp3 (I'm happy to be corrected on either of these points!).

 

However, what makes this seem entirely unreasonable is that on Presto, their pricing structure for a single disc BIS classical album(for example) is:

• mp3 - £6.67
• FLAC 16 bit (CD quality) - £8.13
• 24 bit (hi-res) - £11.67

As far as I can see, this is as expensive as it gets for a single disc. For budget labels such as Naxos, it's even less at £3.67/£4.52/£6.58 for the 3 sample rates outlined. I would reiterate that BIS is not a budget label and this is fairly representative of Presto's pricing. As noted, a classical label has to make pretty much all its money from selling the album (unless they get lucky and licence it out for an advert or something but I don't imagine there's a lot of call for Bartok in advertising...) whereas a soundtrack is largely paid for by the overall production so the soundtrack is just a nice bonus.

 

*Worth noting that I live in Guernsey so don't technically have to pay VAT on things I buy from the UK. However, I don't know if the Presto prices are excluding VAT (I think they might be as they are quite odd prices to pick!) so it's possible that if you're in the UK you'd pay a bit more, but it would only add a pound or two and still be considerably cheaper than 7Digital. 7Digital definitely don't take off the VAT.

[enderdrag64 624]

I have to say, as somebody who's only gotten into film soundtracks recently, the entire industry is extremely obtuse and off-putting to an outsider.

 

I don't know what the first film score was where I really noticed that the music on the soundtrack didn't match what was in the film, but I do know there have been many times where I've tried looking for music I thought was memorable, and I couldn't find it anywhere on the album.

 

The only reason I even got into this niche subject, all started two years ago, when I decided I wanted to rip some of my dad's old CD collection. When I was ripping the Phantom Menace soundtrack, I noticed that the track titles on the back cover didn't line up with the order of events as they occurred in the film. Then I decided to Google "phantom menace ost chronological order" and I stumbled on that chrono-score blogspot page, and then eventually onto this site. But it wasn't really until I was looking into the Clone Wars music a week or two later and found CGCJ's spreadsheets that I realized not only are OSTs out of order, they're also generally incomplete, and there are other ways to get extra music not on the album.

 

Over the last two years, I've grown accustomed to things that everyone else on this forum has probably thought were normal for years:

 

OSTs have music that's not in the film

The film has music not in the OSTs

Film music is often microedited in the film

Film music is often microedited on the OST, but in a different way than it is in the film

OSTs often present the music out of order

OSTs often combine multiple cues together

OST track tiles don't reflect the original composer's titles of the original cues

Credits are often not given properly, if at all. For example, on all the official Star Wars animated show OSTs, the only one who's credited is Kevin Kiner. On Hans Zimmer movies, he is often the only composer to get credited despite having additional composers writing cues. Even John Williams has been known not to credit orchestrators from what I've read in other threads.

 

All of these things are completely nonsensical and honestly anti-consumer. Speaking of which, I haven't even addressed music platforms themselves which until extremely recently only ever really offered lossy downloads and even now want to charge an exorbitant amount for lossless releases, when the music is already arguably too expensive the way it is. 

 

I want to go on a tangent for a second about video games. On the PC platform, the most common place to buy games is the platform Steam. Steam rakes in billions of dollars per year in game sales, even despite how easy it is to pirate many of the games that they sell. The CEO of Valve (the company that makes Steam) has gone on record saying that he believes most piracy has nothing to do with people being unwilling to pay for a product, but is a consequence of pirates providing a better service than the legitimate sellers. The way Steam combats piracy is by doing the exact opposite of that. If you buy a game on Steam, you have complete social integration with your friends, you can earn trading cards, you can earn achievements, you can participate in the Steam Workshop, you can use their integrated livestreaming tools, etc. These are all features that you would not have access to if you were to pirate the game. Additionally, the Steam platform has a very good user review system that helps you to decide if games are worth the money. They also make sure that pricing is not an issue for consumers, by bundling products together and offering discounts on the bundles, and by constantly having sales every 3 months or so where games can be and often are up to 95% off their normal price.

 

All this is to say, Steam is a better choice for most consumers than piracy. Why should I risk going to a sketchy Russian site and getting malware just to miss out on all these features? With the film music industry, I feel that it is the exact opposite the way it is designed currently. Why should I buy an OST album if I know that there's going to be a bootleg, or an expanded release, or an FYC album coming down the way eventually with more music? Further, why should I buy the expanded release, if I've already paid for the OST? I'd argue for most consumers, it just looks like a money-grab.

 

I believe that if the people at specialty labels want to continue to make money, the entire industry has to be burnt down and rebuilt from the ground up. I think film music should be released in its expanded form from the get-go, ideally in its complete score form rather than an isolated score. Most consumers are not going to know the difference between all the different film score jargon, and they honestly probably don't even care. They're just going to buy the "soundtrack album", and so making just one of them makes things less confusing. As much as I like physical media, CDs are a dying format, and so releasing the music digitally is a given. While I think lossy/lossless downloads should be presented as download options, the same purchase should get you the album regardless of the format. In other words, the album should not cost anymore in FLAC than it does in MP3. Finally, I think the music sellers need to offer incentives to buy from their platforms. I don't know if that means detailed liner notes, maybe excerpts from sheet music, interviews with composers, but there has to be something to give people a reason to want to buy from them. And I think the prices as they are are way too prohibitive. Very few people have the money to drop $20+ on every album that they buy, especially in today's world where music is streamable digitally for free. Either the prices come down, or they implement a system like on Steam where there are regular sales and bundles.

 

[Andy 4,140]

Well, if nothing else, this is giving me the urge to give the Orville some consideration. 

 

Maybe if they sold them in a multipack with Vinyl... a standard vinyl gatefold with the LP and a small inset digibook style platter to hold the CD?  I know, it sounds silly, but I'm just trying to think of outside the box marketing gimmicks to keep the format alive.

[Jay 37,370]

Wow, @enderdrag64! That is the coolest post I've read on this forum in a while. Thank you for all that! Lots to consider and discuss! 

[Bespin 8,484]

Interesting @enderdrag64, but some people, even critics, still found sometimes a full length CD for a score to be "too long". hehe. I will not share names!

 

Then, a composer is perfectly entitled to chose what bits of music he wants to share on an album... even more if he produces it himself.

 

For me, the movie, the OST, the FYC version of the score and then, the expanded complete version of the score, represents four different "works" (of art).

 

It's hard to please everybody!

 

Of course, as collectors, we want them all! But "when" to release "what" and in "which" form... It's hard to make a rule that will fit every score...

[Holko 9,529]

1 hour ago, enderdrag64 said:

I believe that if the people at specialty labels want to continue to make money, the entire industry has to be burnt down and rebuilt from the ground up.

With all the AFM rules' idiocy and confusedness at what they even count as what and why, one can only imagine what a hopeless clusterfuck all the rest of the contracts and agreements and licensing structures and copyright laws. I totally agree that it should all be reset to 0 and rebuilt very simply and logically.

 

The film score is the film score, that's as simple as it is. The fact that it's butchered in the film, butchered on the album, then shoved away for decades to rot is just an insult to the artform, its makers and its enjoyers. Imagine if you could only watch a movie in select cinemas and on home formats you'd only get a highlight reel. Imagine if classical composers' complete works could only be performed in the concert hall and only the suites were ever allowed to be recorded and commercially released. Imagine if no book or website was allowed to show the Mona Lisa, only a copy with the background blurred, the left eye badly copypasted over the right, the smile half-replaced by a black void, and your only chance to see the real thing was to beat your way through the Louvre crowd. It's fucking absurd. Of course, if the composer wants to craft a shortened album experience because of the decades of programming their brain to do it, sure, go ahead, do it and release it, but why does it have to come at the cost of the actual work? If I subjectively prefer parts of a score more than others or think a cue is too long prefer an alternate over the uninspired tempcopying rewrite, I can make my own adjustments, microedits, rearrangements if I have it all. But if all I have is the OST with bad analog microedits, a random edited order with crossfades, and the best 20 minutes outright missing because the dumbass album deadline was 3 weeks before the recording sessions completed, I can't undo that. When I was getting into scores, the OSTs being the way they are and the lack of any wide proper release would've put me off for life completely if I wouldn't have found the classic JRPG worshipping site where I could get the actual goddamn music, not half a concert piece edited into an unrelated cue and my favourite cues, as well as the entire shape, structure and thematic development replaced with a middle finger-shaped void.

 

Wasn't there some post about Zimmer or an acolyte posting some missing cue "will leak anyway"? Excuse me, how bloody hard would it be to just release it in the first place, you brainiacs? Don't you like making money?

[Disco Stu 15,495]

1 hour ago, enderdrag64 said:

OSTs have music that's not in the film

The film has music not in the OSTs

Film music is often microedited in the film

Film music is often microedited on the OST, but in a different way than it is in the film

OSTs often present the music out of order

OSTs often combine multiple cues together

OST track tiles don't reflect the original composer's titles of the original cues

Credits are often not given properly, if at all. For example, on all the official Star Wars animated show OSTs, the only one who's credited is Kevin Kiner. On Hans Zimmer movies, he is often the only composer to get credited despite having additional composers writing cues. Even John Williams has been known not to credit orchestrators from what I've read in other threads.

If none of this was the case, I suspect at least some members of the fan community would lose interest in the genre.  It often seems to me that for them figuring out the complicated puzzle of how all these pieces fit together is more important/satisfying than the music itself!

 

/light snark

[Dave 217]

How scores should released, IMHO (only working in digital):

 

-Delivering the complete score in chronoligical order (no matter how long, TV show or film or other)

-With microedited/joined tracks (edited by composer/producer) at the end of the release as bonus tracks

-theme suites / concert arrangements as bonus tracks (if there are any)

-A PDF booklet with notes how the composer/producer would arrange the tracks for optimized listening, for those who want it.

[Koray Savas 2,251]

On 5/2/2022 at 3:38 AM, bruce marshall said:

So you like having two or three companies controlling what we see and hear?😗

That’s been the reality of capitalist America for some time now.

 

Not like buying a CD is gonna change the world. Why would you willingly inconvenience yourself?

[1977 1,743]

11 hours ago, Bryant Burnette said:

My last couple of cars have not had CD players, and since that's the primary time during which I listen to music, my desire to buy new CDs has practically vanished.  The only reliable exception: John Williams stuff.  I've got a nice collection of his work going, and have no intention of letting that change.

Good point, although personally I'm far too precious over my CDs to ever put them in a car CD player, even if my current car had one.

[Richard Penna 3,694]

3 hours ago, Bespin said:

It's hard to please everybody!

 

Of course, as collectors, we want them all! But "when" to release "what" and in "which" form... It's hard to make a rule that will fit every score...

 

Actually, I don't think that conceptually it's hard to get it right at all.

 

Mark Isham tried something with his score for some movie called 'The Conspirator': he released two digital editions - a 45 minute listening experience (which I bought) and a complete edition with the full score, alternates, etc. (He also did a third one that combined the two for those who wanted both.)

 

My point being that no one had to wait for more music. Isham's followers could decide for themselves whether the album was enough for them, or if they'd seen the film and liked the music, they were ready to hear more of it.

 

Of course this depends on fees, composer wishes, etc, but in theory (i.e. assume for a moment that both of those are in our favour), I have yet to hear an argument against this sort of model that doesn't boil down to essentially patronisingly telling fans that they should wait and enjoy their 'listening experience' before they can hear the rest.

4 hours ago, enderdrag64 said:

I have to say, as somebody who's only gotten into film soundtracks recently, the entire industry is extremely obtuse and off-putting to an outsider.

 

I don't know what the first film score was where I really noticed that the music on the soundtrack didn't match what was in the film, but I do know there have been many times where I've tried looking for music I thought was memorable, and I couldn't find it anywhere on the album.

 

 

I know exactly when it was for me - the first LotR score. Saw the film then found the soundtrack CD and immediately noticed that lots of my favourite moments weren't on it. It took a long time for it to 'click' that an 80 minute CD can't hold all of the music in a 3 hour film!

 

On the album cost issue, I think it's simply that retailers can charge more for lossless files than mp3 as it adds value. In terms of storage, 320k mp3 is about half the file size of flac, so one could make the argument that in order to provide lossless files at all, the retailer is provisioning double the storage they'd need if they just hosted lossy. However, I suspect that the 'value added' is more prominent in the eventual price.

[1977 1,743]

4 hours ago, Bespin said:

Interesting @enderdrag64, but some people, even critics, still found sometimes a full length CD for a score to be "too long". hehe. I will not share names!

 

Then, a composer is perfectly entitled to chose what bits of music he wants to share on an album... even more if he produces it himself.

 

For me, the movie, the OST, the FYC version of the score and then, the expanded complete version of the score, represents four different "works" (of art).

 

It's hard to please everybody!

 

Of course, as collectors, we want them all! But "when" to release "what" and in "which" form... It's hard to make a rule that will fit every score...

This post pretty much sums up perfectly my feelings on the OST vs C&C debate.