Bootlegs, Promos, and the Unreleased:
What are they and are they worth all the fuss?
Promos: When soundtrack collectors see promos being auctioned off
on the secondary markets these days, they often chase after them with
completely undivided attention. But why? What makes them so special?
First, you have to understand what a promo is. Promotional releases are
identified by the text (somewhere on the CD of packaging) that reads "For
promotional use only. Not Licensed for Sale." What this means is that the
producers of the CD did not pay the re-use fees required of an official
release. Re-use fees, in case you are unfamiliar with them, are the fees
required by a union of orchestra players to pay their salaries. These
re-use fees are often astronomical in price, varying on the prestige of
the orchestra. For instance, the London Symphony Orchestra will differ
from the City of Prague Symphony Orchestra, or to a small orchestra in
Los Angeles (which usually is the case in most modern soundtrack
recordings).
The "producers" I refer to above are often the composers themselves,
however every once in a while, their agency, film studio, or special
interest group gets hold of the original recordings and presses them.
There are many reasons why composers might wish for their works to
released promotionally: first, composers often push tapes or CDs of their
works when it comes to awards time. Every few years, word leaks out that
a composer sent all the Academy members a tape of his score in hopes that
he would win favor when voting time came around. This has been rumoured
(--and correct us if our info is misguided--) in the cases of Hans
Zimmer's The Lion King and Luis Bacalov's Il Postino (which
beat Apollo 13 and Braveheart, if you remember, for the
Academy Award in 1995). Secondly, a composer sometimes wants his work on
CD or tape so he can send samples of his talents to potential employers.
Many young, upstart composers begin this way... especially when they're
still doing scores for small, unknown films that have no chance of ever
being officially released. Thirdly, it has been said that the composer
himself sometimes produces a promo just for his own listening enjoyment.
This is quite understandable, and sometimes a promo is released only to
the composer, and his family and friends. Such pressings are, of course,
extremely collectible.
Even though promos aren't meant to be sold, some always make their way to
the collectors' secondary market (let's just call it a recent bad habit).
Some are sold directly to soundtrack dealers to help finance the
production costs. Promos sell in a range of $20 to $60, although
individual titles have soared up to amazing costs of $200 (take, for
instance, the 2-CD set of themes by Alan Silvestri called Selected
Themes that was distributed only by Silvestri personally to industry
insiders). Edition sizes vary between 300 and 500 copies (so you can
understand the collectible value), although some promos, such as the
popular one of James Horner's Apollo 13 are more readily
available. Sometimes the composers themselves are hit with an
overwhelming number of requests for their promos.
So are they worth chasing? Sadly, they're usually not worth it. The sound
quality is not always acceptable by any means. The 1995 release of John
Williams' The Poseidon Adventure has terrible sound. Often times,
though, a promotional CD is the only way to get a piece of music that you
desire. I often don't bother with promos (and I agree with Lukas Kendall
on this point) because the best material is already released in regular
public releases. It is not often that a digitally impressive recording of
great music is to be found on a promo.
Note: Sometimes, composer-autographed promos hit the secondary market and
collectors go completely nuts --spending enough money to buy themselves a
delightful new stereo system. Personally, I think that's a bunch of shit.
Remember, it's the music we seek and love! Until the day that
composers have cute little trading cards just like athletes, such folly
is beyond rational explanation...
Bootlegs: Perhaps the most mysterious collectible is the bootleg.
Industry insiders hate them with a vengence, and consumers should
logically hate them too, but yet they remain collectibles.
A bootleg results from the idea in someone's head to press an illegal
copy of a score and make a lot of money off of it. The scam itself is
what industry insiders acknowledge as the evil. Some institutions,
publications, and dealerships refuse to even acknowledge bootlegs.
Filmtracks does, not because we endorse bootlegging, but rather because
we see and hear the demand for these bootlegs every day. For example, we
receive numerous requests a month for more information about two famous
Elmer Bernstein bootlegs: The Black Cauldron and The Journey of
Natty Gann. And although the quality of these releases leaves a bit
to be desired, the true lovers of Bernstein's music motivates the
consumer (and thus, the bootlegger).
The economics of a bootleg are simple. Where the person making the
bootleg acquires the source of music is often in question (note that most
bootlegs have absolutely hideous sound quality). Most bootlegs have
historically (meaning 1990-1996) come out of Germany, Romania, and other
European nations, although the United States is catching up. The cost to
produce a CD (including the pressing, insert, and jewel case) is around
$3. This is actually true of almost all CDs --which is the subject of
numerous ongoing consumer-group lawsuits against the CD industry for
inflating prices-- and has given life to those mail-order discount houses
such as Columbia and BMG. After the bootleg is produced, copies of it are
sold from $30 to $100 and, as you might expect, the needy consumers are
there to buy it.
So the crime rests on the shoulders of both the producers and buyers of
bootlegs. Personally, I sometimes look through my collection of CDs and
wonder where some of these bootlegs really come from. I have one title
from Romania that I cannot remember purchasing, and when I looked up the
film's title in the Internet Movie Database, I discovered that the film
doesn't supposedly exist! It's at moments like that when a bootleg
possesses a brief feeling of charm. But to be honest, I generally
recommend against purchasing bootlegs, even though Filmtracks has some
listed in its title database.
The Unreleased: Everybody's always complaining about unreleased
scores. And although there's some good material out there that hasn't
been legitimately released on CD (think of all the John Barry scores we'd
love to have, for instance), in reality most of the good stuff has indeed
been released.
The main reason why some scores aren't released is money. Most unreleased
scores wouldn't finish in the black if they were released. Remember, the
soundtrack collecting community isn't all that large. There might be
2,000 or 3,000 fans around the globe who want a certain score on CD, but
the record label that holds the rights needs to sell at least 16,000 CDs
to break even.
And then there's the re-use fees... those damn fees! Due to the union
fees placed on recordings by an orchestra (as explained in the promo
section above), releasing an album can be quite expensive (upwards of
$20,000 to $30,000 --or even more). Suppose then that the record company,
once acquiring the license to produce the CD, then spends $80,000 to
press and package 20,000 CDs... The project can then run past $100,000
very easily!
In some geographic areas, there exist no re-use fees. Utah, Washington,
Germany, etc have no such fees, so that's why a score recorded in those
ares can run up to 75 minutes long. Otherwise, a record label pays in
increments of time. Say, for instance, that a record label has to pay in
increments of evey 18 minutes of music. Obviously, the most
cost-effective release would be a 35 minute on. This is why many labels
--and especially Varèse Sarabande-- release 30 - 35 minute scores.
(They're not doing it on purpose just to irritate us!). Additional
expenses include restoration of original master tapes. A score can be
unreleased because the original tapes are missing or there's a legal
battle over the ownership of them.
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Page created 6/6/97, updated 8/1/01. Version 3.0 (Filmtracks Publishing) Copyright © 1996-2001, Christian Clemmensen. All rights reserved. The reviews, audio, and notes contained on the filmtracks.com site may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of Filmtracks Publications.
