There are different categories of DVDs, the ones you sell for a hundred bucks because you're only selling a few and the ones you sell for cheap because you're selling a million.
You could work that sort of thing into the deal. If X sells more than Y units the price for the rights increases. That only benefits the people living on the rights -- they sell more songs at a lower price and can sell some (that never would have sold under the current system) at the higher.
I don't know that F&G's one Styx song necessarily starts a revival, but look what Muriel's Wedding did for ABBA (Mama Mia for one). The way it stands now they're cutting themselves off from that possibility.
Gilligan's Island wasn't re-run ad nauseum because it was so good but because it was so cheap because the actors had lousy contracts -- and now its part of our consciousness well beyond its merits. It would be smart to try and get a bit of that buzz with the periodic cheap deal. WKRP could TOTALLY do that sort of thing.
They're making money off of content they don't own, though.
Hence my parenthetical "this is probably the whole point."
I don't know that F&G's one Styx song necessarily starts a revival
They also did "Lady." Then there was that "Mr. Roboto" in the car (VW?) commercial. I think that was the whole of the Styx revival.
They're making money off of content they don't own, though. It's basically reprinting copyrighted material. I don't think a songwriter is thinking about the advertising, so much, but that they're using someone else's property for their own profit. I don't know if RIAA is involved or not, but I imagine ASCAP and BMI should be.
I assume they are and I'm not saying they shouldn't be. And the songwriters, etc. should absolutely profit (unlike they are now when a show goes un-released).
I'm saying it would behoove the record companies to have a boiler-plate, simplified, rights-obtaining agreement that starts with low payments which would increase with higher sales.
And David and Corwood beat me to the F&G stuff. I know there are a couple songs they couldn't get for the DVD release but I don't know which ones. I suppose I could do a marathon viewing of my VHS F&G and then my DVD F&G...
I'm down to 3 hours and 8 minutes.
Gross.
There are a lot of songwriters out there just eking a living off of rights
The sad part is how little of the fee actually ends up going to the rightsholder. I was working with fiction writers, pursuing permission to reprint one short story per person, and all of them were appalled that their companies were charging like $2000 for a story, and then the authors themselves were getting like $200 of that.
(All of them had signed the appropriate contracts; there was no illegal hijinkery; they just hadn't actually thought through the part where they're not the ones who get to set the permission fee.)
(Sometimes, having an appalled author on your side is really useful in browbeating the company to lower its fee. And then, as is the case with Edith Wharton's "Roman Fever," the reprint fee is $4700, whether you like it or not.)
(Nobody reprints that story any more, since the fee went up.)
David: what Spidra said. There were a few songs they had to switch out, but I'm not quite up for the marathon viewing experience to document them. Now that I think about it, though, I seem to recall there being a website that did so. Because the Internet was created by people who have a lot more free time than I do, and that's scary.
So what are people doing this weekend?
I suspect my weekend will involve a lot of vegging and cleaning, since I'll be avoiding the traffic from the graduation ceremonies at the college down the hill from me.
