What exactly do you think that "manufactured on demand" means except overpriced and poorly produced CDRs?
I'll rather wait for something and have it done by a real label that actually cares about their product and customers than have something now available in poor quality and pretty much for the same price.
I didn't read that as soundtracks, I read it as music from the Warner record labels. They have a vast back catalogue, pop & classical.
The original comment does specify "Seems like there's a lot of film scores that would benefit from the WAC model" - film scores in particular... and Warner's comment agrees with that.
The Warner Archives DVD's I have are quality product. The Amazon CD's on demand I own have been good quality overall.
As long as the music is CD quality, I'm just happy that things are released.
Absolutely. If that's the only way to get unreleased scores, I'm all for it. Expecting pressed CDs for every low-demand soundtrack is just not realistic.
Masterworks Broadway has started releasing things this way--as a download, or as a pressed CD-R. They just released the soundtrack from the 1959 LI'L ABNER film, which hasn't been on CD before.
Am I missing something? Unless Warner Bros. has made a deal with the musicians' union (which is, of course, possible), pressing very small numbers of never-released scores seems a prohibitively expensive proposition. Sure, they could reissue LPs (and out of print CDs), but Warner Bros. is no longer associated with Warner Bros. Records -- that's a completely separate company -- so what back catalogue could they have?
This seems like a natural idea for pre-existing LPs and OOP CDs, although I too wonder what Warner Bros. Pictures has available to them in that regard. As to releasing previously unavailable film music, that would seem to entail a lot of work--the same level of work as our specialty labels now put in to creating a new release. That seems to be a different animal from just transferring previously existing films onto digital.
Great news about the LI'L ABNER soundtrack becoming available. Late last year we got the film version of the stage musical A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC from the same source. Can we dare hope for the other films-from-stage-musicals to which Columbia Records holds the soundtrack rights--1776 and PORGY AND BESS?
Does this mean we will finally get some Warner Bros. Max Steiner? Waxman? Tiomkin? Roemheld? Deutsch? and? Would love to see Chisum and 60s and 70s WB too.
For Warner soundtrack releases I'd look to La-La Land & Intrada. I can't see Warner bothering, the market is just too tiny, easier to license out titles.
