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Hollow Man - complete !
That would be excellent. 
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Hollow Man - complete !
Naw, buddy. We Goldsmith nuts have had an embarrassment of riches lately. 2020 ended with a bundle of Goldsmith, but looking at 2021 releases alone we've had Looney Tunes complete, Along Came a Spider complete, Lionheart complete, Face of a Fugitive complete, Shamus complete, SPYS complete, The Stripper complete, Caboblanco complete, the remastered reissue of the LSO Rio Conchos/The Artist Who Did Not Want to Paint, and the CD premiere of the great finale cue Goldsmith wrote for Flaming Star! All that in only FIVE MONTHS. That's insane and wonderful. Let's be grateful and leave some space for non-Goldsmith now.
The Matrix - complete!
Hudson Hawk - complete!
Christopher Columbus: The Discovery - complete!
The Secret Garden - complete!
The Scorpion King - complete!
Mists of Avalon - complete!
Paycheck - complete!
Demolition Man - complete!
Final Analysis - complete!
Terminal Velocity - complete!
The Dark Half - complete!
Mouse Hunt - complete!
For Love of the Game - complete!
Memoirs of an Invisible Man - complete!
and for my fellow Golden Age fans...
Forever Amber - complete!
Yavar
I second Demolition Man and The Matrix
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I made a case for putting out a premiere album release of Frank Skinner's great Arabian Nights score to Bryon Davis, who's done a lot of work producing things for Varese and now runs his own label, Notefornote. A lot of people don't know this but he's a big Frank Skinner fan -- he's one big reason the Varese LP to CD series from a few years back included a Frank Skinner disc! (I remember how much that surprised people at the time, both people who liked the Golden Age and people who didn't.) Arabian Nights has circulated amongst collectors for some time now and I gave him a copy, which he loved... but then he told me it just wasn't financially viable any more to produce a premiere commercial release of it, as much as he would love to do so. And you know what? No matter what his taste is and no matter how great the score is, that's the reality. He would *lose money* if he put out an obscure Golden Age score. And that's a sad truth that certain people are sadly unwilling to accept...but maybe if they put their own money into such a venture, they would finally be forced to admit reality, rather than demanding that others suffer financial ruin for their own temporary pleasure.
Certainly nobody will dispute it that you won´t earn any money with a Frank Skinner CD release. And in most cases you will even lose money as you won´t sell more than 500 copies, probably rather fewer – but what is the point about that and what is so special about "losing money"?
My question to you: Do you have any idea how many times we lost money for example with the more extravagant older Italian scores from the 50s and 60s (licensed from Sugar) which we have released on the Spanish Saimel label during the last few years? It happened quite often, but we didn´t regret it in the least because we loved the scores and we wanted to get them released in an act of preservation. It was a labor of love so to say for which in the end you don´t earn any cent. That´s the reality. And did you ever hear any complaints from me or from the label´s owner Juan Angel Saiz that so much money was lost? Of course not.
Therefore it is nothing new and nothing special for me at all that you have to put some of your own money into such a venture. You don´t have to explain this in the way you did above.
Nevertheless, I think that at least a kind of mixed calculation in the way a label like Quartet in Spain often does it should be possible: A big seller like a Goldsmith or Williams title should render it possible to produce now and then a CD with a title which you personally like very much, but of which you know that it will not earn any money or that you will rather lose quite a lot of it. It is obvious that several of the Italian or Spanish titles that Quartet has released during the last years didn´t make any profit for them, but they could compensate this with some popular US titles which finance the other ones and keep the label alive. This is the way it works for them. And why should it not work for one of the US labels? Or are we talking only about profit and nothing else anymore these days so that no title which gets produced should be a commercial failure at all?
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Of course labels knowingly release things they are likely to take a financial loss on, Stefan. But that's their choice. There is no reason they should feel *obligated* to do so, and the rest of us who are not financially invested in their choices for release have no right to browbeat and shame them for opting not to release something which they know will hurt them financially. That is the height of entitlement: "I have decided that YOU must lose money to bring me something I want!" I'm calling out those people, not labels who heroically decide to release something they know they will lose money on.
Yavar
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It is clear that no soundtrack collector has the right to force the labels to release titles for which they will lose money as it is always the decision of the label owners what to release and what not.
Nevertheless, nowadays I very much miss the days for example of the FSM and SAE/BYU labels when there was so much more idealism and old scores were released even though when they didn´t bring in any money. Or if we look back at Robert Townson´s passion for Alex North: I am quite sure that he lost money on some of these titles he released as part of the Varese Club many years ago and he even knew that in advance, but it didn´t deter him to produce them. Those times are over.
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Nevertheless, nowadays I very much miss the days for example of the FSM and SAE/BYU labels when there was so much more idealism and old scores were released even though when they didn´t bring in any money. Or if we look back at Robert Townson´s passion for Alex North: I am quite sure that he lost money on some of these titles he released as part the Varese Club many years ago and he even knew that in advance, but it didn´t deter him to produce them. Those times are over.
It matters *how much* money you lose on passion projects. If you can barely break even, or lose $1000 on a release, that's one thing. But what if you pour your time and money into a release, and it sells less than 100 copies? What if you're out $5000? $10,000? How many releases like that can one afford to keep putting out, if one is not independently wealthy?
My impression about FSM is that one of the several reasons Lukas closed up shop (eight years ago now!) was he could tell the audience for older scores was dwindling (I think he said that The Great Santini, a fantastic premiere score release by the great Elmer Bernstein, sold less than 500 copies — that was over a decade ago and things have only gotten worse since then!) That's no doubt part of why Bruce at Kritzerland has stopped doing Golden Age film music releases too. Releases that would have at least sold 800 copies before were only selling 400 (or worse), that kind of thing. Simplistically speaking: At $20 a difference of 400 fewer sales equates to $8,000 less return on investment. There's only so much money you can lose, so many times, and still be viable as a film music label (unless the person running it is independently wealthy). Here in the United States we have to pay ridiculous amounts of money for necessities like healthcare, too. I don't think it's that there are no longer any idealistic producers. I think idealism only carries you so far, and CD sales are lower than they have ever been -- even on Goldsmith titles.
Yavar
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Nevertheless, nowadays I very much miss the days for example of the FSM and SAE/BYU labels when there was so much more idealism and old scores were released even though when they didn´t bring in any money. Or if we look back at Robert Townson´s passion for Alex North: I am quite sure that he lost money on some of these titles he released as part the Varese Club many years ago and he even knew that in advance, but it didn´t deter him to produce them. Those times are over.
It matters *how much* money you lose on passion projects. If you can barely break even, or lose $1000 on a release, that's one thing. But what if you pour your time and money into a release, and it sells less than 100 copies? What if you're out $5000? $10,000? How many releases like that can one afford to keep putting out, if one is not independently wealthy?
My impression about FSM is that one of the several reasons Lukas closed up shop (eight years ago now!) was he could tell the audience for older scores was dwindling (I think he said that The Great Santini, a fantastic premiere score release by the great Elmer Bernstein, sold less than 500 copies — that was over a decade ago and things have only gotten worse since then!) That's no doubt part of why Bruce at Kritzerland has stopped doing Golden Age film music releases too. Releases that would have at least sold 800 copies before were only selling 400 (or worse), that kind of thing. Simplistically speaking: At $20 a difference of 400 fewer sales equates to $8,000 less return on investment. There's only so much money you can lose, so many times, and still be viable as a film music label (unless the person running it is independently wealthy). Here in the United States we have to pay ridiculous amounts of money for necessities like healthcare, too. I don't think it's that there are no longer any idealistic producers. I think idealism only carries you so far, and CD sales are lower than they have ever been -- even on Goldsmith titles.
Yavar
A great teacher once told me, “never fall in love with your own writing.” Based on the amounts you write, you must not only be in love with your writing, but probably make love to it every night to “Ballad of the Whale.”
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It matters *how much* money you lose on passion projects. If you can barely break even, or lose $1000 on a release, that's one thing. But what if you pour your time and money into a release, and it sells less than 100 copies? What if you're out $5000? $10,000? How many releases like that can one afford to keep putting out, if one is not independently wealthy?
Tell me about it. I know that experience of selling less than 100 copies of one CD release well enough. That´s nothing new to me.
And in addition I can imagine that to license a Skinner title from Universal will be a very expensive affair - if at all, this could probably only be done via the Universal Classics series.
But as I wrote above, Quartet in Spain has really found a clever way to mix popular (US) titles which will attract a larger audience (also the US collectors) with smaller European titles and for some of these they will not gain much or any profit at all. And this policy seems to work for them in a quite successful way so that they are also able to now and then squeeze in a more obscure title for which they know that they will lose money. It is of course only possible because Quartet has built up a solid reputation during the last 10 years and therefore in the meantime has a large worldwide audience among soundtrack collectors.
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Wow. This thread is totally off course.
Admins, can we kill it and start afresh on this topic?
Cheers
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A great teacher once told me, “never fall in love with your own writing.” Based on the amounts you write, you must not only be in love with your writing, but probably make love to it every night to “Ballad of the Whale.”
And based on your posts, you love my writing even more than I do, because you're certainly doing your utmost here to provoke more of it! 
Yavar (not really a fan of Rosenman's Star Trek IV; sorry to ruin your little mental fantasy)
P.S. Thanks to you as well for the support, Tevose and Grack21!
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A great teacher once told me, “never fall in love with your own writing.” Based on the amounts you write, you must not only be in love with your writing, but probably make love to it every night to “Ballad of the Whale.”
And based on your posts, you love my writing even more than I do, because you're certainly doing your utmost here to provoke more of it!
Yavar (not really a fan of Rosenman's Star Trek IV; sorry to ruin your little mental fantasy)
P.S. Thanks to you as well for the support, Tevose and Grack21!
Your posts are like driving by car accidents. Hard not to look and cringe.
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A great teacher once told me, “never fall in love with your own writing.” Based on the amounts you write, you must not only be in love with your writing, but probably make love to it every night to “Ballad of the Whale.”
Yavar’s lengthy responses are always refreshing, in my view. In this day and age, we need more intelligent conversation and well-thought out dialogue, not less. This particular response of yours to it all only shows how little of both can come in the more abbreviated of exchanges. Grow up, and try counting to three before you speak.
Brevity is the soul of wit.
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Wow. This thread is totally off course.
Admins, can we kill it and start afresh on this topic?
Cheers
Why? It actually seems interesting now.
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