At 10:58 AM -0500 2/4/06, Kim Patrick Clow wrote:
I'm wondering if anyone has thoughts on the impact Finale has made
on publishing music.
Let's not limit this to Finale. Computerized digital engraving, per
se, has made an enormous impact. It enables anyone who formerly
would have hand-copied music to turn out publisher-quality product,
which has probably turned the world of professional copyist shops
upside down. In the amateur world, it allows anyone to turn out good
if not perfect copy, just as digital music handling and MIDI allow
anyone to get their musical ideas performed. Whether this is an
improvement is a separate question.
Has it and the creation of desktop publishing had any impact on the
business models?
Now this is quite another question entirely. Another has pointed out
that established publishers simply contract out the engraving, but
that has been the case for many years including pre-digital
engraving. I believe that it was after WW 2 that publishers started
contracting their work to Asian engravers who worked much more
cheaply than American engravers, hardly the first industry to go in
that direction. Composers serving the movie, recording studio, and
traveling musical act businesses long contracted to manuscript shops.
No, I would guess that the biggest impact has been to make desktop
publishers and desktop publishing actually viable for the first time
in centuries. (Bach and Handel were--literally!--desktop publishers
in terms of their own music for immediate use, and that model did not
change until digital engraving became available to anyone with a
computer.)
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?
Yes and no. In the short run, probably very little impact, because
publishers do much more than simply have music engraved and printed.
Marketing is an important publisher function, needed to create
demand. Distribution is an important publisher function, making it
possible to meet that demand. Neither is easy on the small scale of
a desktop publisher, many of whom simply lack the business training
that is necessary, and almost all of whom lack the financing to do
large-scale marketing or distribution.
In the longer term, however, once the techniques of digital marketing
and and distribution via the Internet are invented, tested, and
adopted--and it's happening as we speak--digital publishing will
inevitably replace brick and mortar publishing as surely as the
automobile replaced the one-horse open sleigh. And never again will
anything have to go permanently out of print! Print-on-demand has
much to recommend it, and when anyone can invest a little time in
preparing a new edition of a public domain work, and undercut the
rental houses by 50%, the rental side of the business will become
limited to only copyrighted works, and copyright owners less and less
willing to turn over their copyrights to publishers who simply get in
the way between the composer and the performer. Yes, there will
still be distribution specialists, but they will learn to distribute
in the form that the market wants or they will go out of business,
and they will lose the leverage that has long enabled publishers to
demand ownership of copyrights.
Which leaves one final publisher's function which will be even more
difficult to find a replacement for. Traditionally, publishers have
screened the available music, evaluated it in terms BOTH of its
quality and its marketing potential, and rejected what they
considered unworthy. This is triage: judging whether something is
high quality but unprofitable, decent quality and capable of
supporting higher quality product, or poor quality and not worth
trying to market. When everyone is able to publish, market, and
distribute their music via the Internet, who is going to do that
triage? Who has TIME to wade through everything available just to
find the few works that seem to have quality?
And yet it will have to be done, and what I suspect will happen is
that third party evaluators will take on more importance than they
have ever had in all of music history. It's already happening on
special interest lists like ChoralTalk and OrchestraList, and was
happening on the BandChatList until it disappeared into cyberspace.
It's happening informally, as listmembers comment on works that
they've found especially worthwhile and recommendable, and even in
its primitive state it's showing its value. I expect to see more
formalized organizations specializing in reviewing and evaluating new
works, and if their evaluations don't agree with the evaluations of
those buying the music, they won't last long either.
We do live in interesting times. Let's hope that this doesn't
continue to be a curse!
John
"There's really only two types of music: good and bad." ~ Rossini
"There is no bad music. Except Hawaiian." ~ Pete Barbudi, late '60s
musical comic.
--
John & Susie Howell
Virginia Tech Department of Music
Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A 24061-0240
Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034
(mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED])
http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html
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