At 8:49 PM 07/03/02, Peter Castine wrote: >THe "it takes money out of their pockets" argument is one I don't follow. >If they grant permission for you to publish, sell, and/or collect >performing/mechanical rights royalties for your arrangement while taking >a cut of the revenue, they would be generating income, wouldn't they? > >Leastaways that's what I thought, but experience has taught me that >publishers don't think like that. I'd be interested if someone could >explain how they do think. In the meantime, I'm now sticking to PD >material when writing arrangements.
I concur with both your observation and conclusion. Not too long ago I had an encounter with Hal Leonard where I was interested in making an arrangement for a cappella SATB quartet for a certain song they own. The answer I got was that they won't allow any new arrangement if they already have one for the same parts in their catalog, and they recommended their own SATB version to me. The logic seems to be that that particular arrangement is already "done" so there's no need to do it again. But for this particular song, it so happens that their SATB version is lousy. Serious singers don't want to perform it, because it makes them sound bad -- which of course is the reason I wanted to write a new arrangement in the first place. My purpose here isn't an outlet for my own creativity; I just want to have a presentable version of the song to sing to put on a program. And since other singers were interested in having copies, I was looking for permission to distribute it. I was all ready to explain to HL why their published version is unperformable and why mine would be so much better for practical use. And since I really wasn't looking to make any money off it anyway, I was ready to concede pretty much everything in terms of royalties. I figured I was doing them a favor. But they didn't see it that way. Ah well, their loss. Back to PD songs for me. mdl _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
