CompuServe Messages

Unfortunately, we don't have any musicians in the club who volunteered their stuff. We 'simply' wanted to put some music (from CDs) on the sound tracks to make the video more pleasing. A couple of things got in the way (although we were using mostly a single 'artist'). First, it turns out that the albums were published by several different companies, so we had to deal with them separately. Then there was a 'synchronization license' or something like that which we NEVER did try to get because the person who handled that said we needed release from the (C) holders AND (P) holders for the performances we wished to copy. Things wouldn't have been too bad, except that we planned on making maybe (only) 100 copies. This caused some consternation with the record companies who had been willing to 'sell' the rights for around US$.05 / per minute…until they heard that our run was going to be so small….and their TOTAL income from this wouldn't cover their paperwork costs and, in effect, raised their royalties to around US$.25/minute. For a 35 minute tape, that comes to $7.75/copy. We'd sorta been hoping to sell them for around $15 and make a little money for the club, but with royalties alone coming to almost $8 it wasn't gonna work too well. The _final_ straw was CBS Records who _refused_ to let us put 2 minutes 30 seconds of "Jeff Wayne's War of the World" on the tape. Since the animation (a work in progress, the author/artist plans on doing the ENTIRE piece) had been made specifically to synch to this piece I chose to 'call it quits' on the soundtrack. It was a VERY disappointing experience. It is my opinion, that if the music industry wants to lower piracy, they ought to make it a bit easier to get 'legal' copies of music onto other media. It is absolutely clear that this video would have 'promoted' the music on the soundtrack (we had one public performance of it (at the club meeting) and were deluged with requests for the names of the pieces on it). Victor A. Wagner, Jr.