Post #308947 by DJ Terence Gunn on Fri, May 25, 2007 12:49 PM

I second that, rupe. Talk about a method that really has no drawbacks and risks, pay per individual song and album downloads by these rare Atomic and Space Age masters is inarguable. The proof of the popularity is, indeed, in the downloading. However, there's more to it than that. Sure it wouldn't cost Capitol anything -- it's just another project for their salary and hourly paid employees anyway. But to the download sites like iTunes, Real, etc. it's another matter, one that involves money, bandwidth, licencing and royalties (usually directly to BMI, ASCAP, and SEASAC, but not directly to the artists themselves -- many, in this case, who are no longer with us and do not have any estates), etc.

As far as it costing Capitol much money in releasing these rare artists' albums on disc, I think everyone here would be surprised how little it costs these big companies to produce and market CDs -- pennies to a dollar or two, pending the circumstances of the product and how many produced. However, making a little profit is of little interest to them. They want big profit. And though I'm not in the business, I know the best way to make profit: cut out the middleman. In this day and age with the internet, media downloads, blogs, free advertising, do-it-yourself technology, and sites such as tikicentral, the middleman for record companies is absolutely superfluous. And in this case, when I say middleman, I also mean superfluous practises -- practises that may have had some legitimacy in the past but that are no longer necessary today.

But it makes me wonder. The Ultra Lounge series, I should think, did very well for Capitol and beyond their expectations; and they continued to release quite a few throughout the years, which constitutes the proof of sales. I still see the compilations in record stores today (even though they were more a product of the mid to late 1990s, and most likely considered for a niche audience only -- which can be in the hundreds of thousands, if one thinks about it realistically).

Perhaps a gathering of names and signatures and putting in requests for these albums to be released on CD is the way to go about it -- much like they do on Amazon.com for movie reissues onto DVD. Perhaps Hanford and Humuhumu and the other moderators can implement such a feature into the tikicentral website?