That's not what pisses me off; though having a limit of 3,000 does almost get my goat.

What gets me is copy after original pressed copy is sold on eBay . They just keep coming. I am pissed off cause I know companies and people bought up at least a thousand of these and hold them to sell than while people like me who wanted it, really wanted it are screwed and will probably have to go for a cd-r now cause the price is justwaaayyy too high.

I can almost bet you the same thing is said about the recent Goldsmith set from Varese.

Should Varese cap the number of copies any one person can buy (companies included)?

To be fair to the FB, yes they should. To be fair to themselves, no. Varese wants their return in this lifetime, not the next one. There is a fine line between serving the FB and running a business.

The fact that Varese's prices on their single-disc limited releases (setting aside the Goldsmith box) are as low as they are indicates that Varese *does* have "our" interests in mind. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that by its very existence Varese is doing us collectors a favor.

I think if you missed out on PREDATOR you've got no one to complain to but yourself. Like an ass I waited on THE ROBE, and it sold out. The only person I'm kicking is myself. And that's how it oughta be!

Of course, Varese could easily have charged $30 or even $40 for it and still sold out, but they didn't. Someone could remind me how much Intrada charged for the Young Sherlock Holmes promo which, if memory serves, was actually a promotional tool for Bruce Broughton and even said "not for sale" on it. Varese's albums, which are actual, licenced, commercial releases, are far cheaper.

Varese is that rare thing in that it really does care about what the fans want and is willing to take huge risks in order to provide it. Was it ever, in a million years, going to make any money from a re-recording of Viva Zapata? I seriously doubt it - so why bother doing it? Because it's important music which NEEDS to be out there. They use the unexpected success of albums like The Sixth Sense or The Matrix to subsidise the gambles, many of which are never really likely to even cover costs, let alone turn a profit.

These club releases are a godsend. Chances are that things like Predator and Die Hard would simply never have been released otherwise (except possibly in some other soundtrack club like Prometheus's).

They do us a real service. Just look at the number of crimson spines on your CD shelf and consider how many of those scores would have been released if it weren't for Varese. Very few labels would take the risk of releasing something like SWAT or The Hunted (to name a couple of recent, good scores) or all those Delerue and Goldsmith albums - or, for that matter, The Matrix or the other score albums Varese has put out even though song compilations were already available. Varese does such a great service to this community of ours, it's always galling to see the apparently constant barrage of criticism they come in for, whether it's for album lengths, over-hyping releases, people not liking the acoustics of their re-recordings, now even releasing CDs that prove to be popular! Whatever. This message is just my little attempt to redress some of the balance.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Dinko:
Would it be legal if I bought myself a Goldsmith set, waited for it to go OOP, then started selling minidiscs where people would get to pick and choose what they want on there? You just want Anna & The King? No problem, here's your MD, just PayPal me $2.50. Legal? Ethical? Should I care?

---