GMG classical music box-set

[Henk]

Henk, while your idea is a good one in theory, I have to agree with Sfz and Sarge: the reality of doing a project like this is far too complicated.  The royalties issue alone would be a daunting one.

--Bruce

Well, the idea is that labels can cooperate in this project, so the problem of royalties is tackled. It's of common interest of the labels and it's a promotion product. And a product which is likely to be highly profitable. The profit can be shared among the labels (in proportion of the royalties for the works on the box-set). They normally won't cooperate with other labels, I understand it's not their nature, but when an organized group of listeners takes this initiative they probably are willing to cooperate for a kind of charity which is in their own benefit: get people, especially young people, interested in classical music.

Henk

[Henk]

That is a classic example of a straw man argument. (That is, objecting to something your interlocutor never claimed in the first place.) The nature of the writing is not the issue at all. By all means folks can and should share their knowledge however they like. The issue is the practical problems of using copyrighted recordings.

I wasn't reacting to that post you are referring to.

[Henk]

Do let us know how the generous, altruistic, non-competitive labels respond to your inquiries.

What are your motives? Do you like to watch me fail or are you really interested?

Well, I'm prepared to be disappointed. I just want to know how they are responding. Enthusiastic or not? Do they give counter-arguments or are just reluctant? Do they like the idea? I can at least learn something from it. But I stay optimistic however otherwise it has no chance at all.

Henk

[Henk]

the generous, altruistic, non-competitive labels.

This is a strong argument. It's against their nature to cooperate with each other, even when it's in their benefit, they don't think in terms of common interest. And I'm not such a fool to think I can change their way of thinking.

So the question is how aggressive, how competitive are they? And can we play it tactfully? When some small labels are willing to cooperate and a big label follows how will other labels react. It's at least interesting to figure this out.

[Henk]

And what I'm proposing is possible to achieve  . . . in this universe.

Ok, do your best. Then we have a GMG book and a GMG box-set.

Henk

[Papy Oli]

Henk,

just to give you a bit of perspective on the scale of such an idea : as student project, a group of us had the aim to create a CD to be sold to the benefit of a children support charity. It was a fairly small scale project given our timeline (approx 250 CD - 5 tracks per CD) to be produced for a one-night sale event.

In a nutshell, labels and sponsors will not do anything for free, nor will their registered artists despite the advertising it could generate. Even for charity purposes, you'd only get their approval for the use of their song on a CD not belonging to their label, but you'd still have to pay the (inter)national copyrights for each track itself, for the engraving of the CDs, its commercial use and for the selling event we had created with our sponsors. Thank god we had 3 unregistered artists also on the CD who fully donated their tracks, because the admin for the remaining 2, was an absolute nightmare to sort out.

The creation of the CD Master plus the burning of the CDs was a big part of the production budget too. Thankfully, we had found a graphics student who did the full design as part of her own studies too at the time. All in all this left us a small but nice profit to give back to the charity.

Work-wise, the full project  took 6 of us 8 months approx besides our uni courses to take to fruition...

[Henk]

Thanks for the information and for sharing this Olivier. The concept of this plan is rather different however.

If the labels don't react positively and I realize it has no chance I'll just stop working on it. So I won't spend much spoiled effort in it and I won't spend money in it either.

Did you sell all the recordings?

[Scarpia]

Well, I'm prepared to be disappointed. I just want to know how they are responding. Enthusiastic or not? Do they give counter-arguments or are just reluctant? Do they like the idea? I can at least learn something from it. But I stay optimistic however otherwise it has no chance at all.

What do you imagine that you are giving to them that they don't already have?  Do you think they aren't able to put together a compilation of classical repertoire, and that they haven't done it before?   Do you think that Universal Classics, for instance, that has the DG, Decca, Philips, Mercury and Westminster back catalog, can't make such a compilation without licensing recordings from their competitors, which would require them to enter into protracted negotiations?  And do you think they will see any advantage is publishing the ramblings of a bunch of people who frequent a web site instead of the carefully prepared linear notes that accompanied the initial release of these recordings?   It may be fun to think of what one would put in such a collection, and we've done something similar recently, see

http://www.good-music-guide.com/community/index.php/topic,17151.0.html

but to imagine that a record company would find this project viable is pure lunacy! 

[Henk]

Ok, easy Scarpia, I won't contact any label and stop working on it by now.

Thanks for your reply.

[Bulldog]

THE END.

[Scarpia]

Ok, easy Scarpia, I won't contact any label and stop working on it by now.

I don't want to discourage your or prevent you from accomplishing your goal, I want to encourage you to go about it in a way that has a reasonable possibility of success.  A sensible way to go about it is to make a web site which has the sort of information you envision, perhaps with links to samples on youtube, and to CDs containing the music suggested.   Such a guide could be put on this site, and I think that the list that was made in response to David Ross's challenge should have been posted on this site.

I googled and noticed something along those lines here:

http://www.classicalcdguide.com/

[Henk]

I like that idea. I have also some experience with web sites.

Henk