Kim Patrick Clow wrote:
I'm wondering if anyone has thoughts on the impact Finale has made on
publishing music.
Has it and the creation of desktop publishing had any impact on the
business models?
Depends on which business models you are thinking about -- rentals
aren't in the least bit affected because the large houses which control
the rentals for most (all?) the major composers of the 20th century
still maintain their "we don't really have to care because we have a
[EMAIL PROTECTED] monopoly, so if you want this great music, you just have to deal
with whatever crap we put in your way" (read some of the posts on
orchestralist to see how the major publishers still can't do customer
service properly, can't even answer a simple "is this aria available as
a separate rental" question without screwing things up).
If you're talking about sales, the same situation exists there for the
major composers and the vast libraries in both the orchestral and band
worlds. Hal Leonard and Warner Brothers control something like 90% of
the band music world, and I don't know how much of orchestral music sales.
Small publishers have a very hard time in the major markets of band
music and orchestral literature. In smaller niche markets such as
specific ensembles, where it's easier to spread the word to potential
customers, such as flute choirs, it's much easier to make a go of things.
But trying to get your publications even known about in the band or
orchestral world is next to impossible without very expensive mailings
or getting your music sold at the big distributors such as JWPepper or
Luck's Music Library.
This computer-technology aspect HAS had a beneficial effect where some
publishers (notably C.L. Barnhouse in the band world) who were smart
enough not to sell their last copy of each publication, have undertaken
to digitize their entire corporate output and make out-of-print music
available once again on a print-on-demand archive system.
With the advent of so many doing research and essentially able to print
their own scores, and bypass
the large publishers, has this had any impact on the industry?
You still can't publish your own version of copyrighted music, so I
would say that the big publishers are still the big publishers and the
little guy still has a massive struggle to get known.
I know that in the United States, there are fewer and fewer publishers
of classical music scores (technically
there aren't any US based labels now that RECORD classical music for
that matter), so with fewer and fewer publishing houses,
would the advent of small presses be a good thing?
Only if they publish music anybody wants to play. There are thousands
of self-published composers who never get any sales because they haven't
got the capital to do any sort of advertising campaign to drive
potential customers to their web-sites.
Sort of the "all dressed up with nowhere to go" syndrome of the computer
age. Beautifully engraved scores (some of them) of fine music (some of
it) but no way the intended marketplace will ever know about it.
Supposedly computers and the Internet is the great democracy of things
(blogs versus traditional mainstream media), mp3 swapping versus buying
cds in stores, artists recording and offering their own music on
personal websites etc. Has anything like this happened with music and
Finale (or any music publication software such as Finale)
Sibelius has a good on-line component in it's Scorch software plug-in,
and there are some Scorch-driven web-sites (jwpepper uses it to sell
immediate-download-and-print-once music) which are generating sales, but
Finale, as far as I can tell, has had no major impact on the publishing
business, nor in actually increasing the ability of small, unknown
composers or publishers to generate sales.
And with the amount of work necessary to typeset a band or orchestra
score in Finale (or Sibelius) it's hardly comparable to people taking a
few seconds to rip a commercial CD to mp3 files and making them
available in a huge piracy scheme to the whole world.
Thanks!
--
Kim Patrick Clow
"There's really only two types of music: good and bad." ~ Rossini
Were Rossini alive today, he'd have to amend that statement:
"There's really only three types of music: good, bad and that which
will never be known because the publishers/composers can't figure out
how to get the music before the right market."
--
David H. Bailey
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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