Classical Music Subscription Series

[astrotoy]

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I agree that classic rock is where the TP catalog is weakest, and as a child of the 70s I'd like to see some of that.  I'm no expert on the music business, but with the record labels hurting as much as they are, you'd think they'd be anxious for any new source of revenue.  And there are precedents - MoFi managed to release the Beatles!  I'm sure I'm not the only one who'd go nuts over a TP tape of Revolver, although I'd expect the demand for something like that would overwhelm the TP.

One approach could be to try to contact musicians who are into sound quality, and could take an interest in what the TP is doing.  Two who come to mind are Neil Young and Steely Dan. 
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Bob has an interesting point. With the vinyl reissues of classic pop and rock on vinyl there is no issue about the installed base of equipment and a typical issue cost of $30 or so for the vinyl pressing. With a universe of 15 ips 2 track IEC EQ tape players much much smaller and a cost of +-$250-300 per album the risks are much higher.  Also I have not been as impressed with the sonic qualities of 60's pop/rock compared to the classical records. The MoFi Beatles box made the Absolute Sound Super Disc list for exactly one issue. Harry Pearson later admitted that he had made a mistake in assessing the sound quality and deleted it from the list. I have the box, and I agree with HP - not that great. On the other hand, our TP pros know more about getting the original sound from the master tape than anyone else and there are not the vagaries of vinyl production. Some of the great sounding stuff that has great artistic merit has been mentioned in other threads - Joni Mitchell Blue, much of early Joan Baez, Jennifer Warnes Raincoat and others.

But we are drifting off topic...    Larry

[docb]

I really appreciate the commentary here, because it means you guys really care about the project, and hopefully it's also giving folks some insight into the difficulty of satisfying the broad range of taste that our subscribers have within the confines of our production capacity.

We have certainly discussed doing some divergent series,and we will continue to pursue the idea. At this point in time the idea is a bit daunting because we are running about as fast as we can right now, with Romo shipping out anywhere from 30-50 albums each week. We still have a couple of goals to achieve before we get into the next phase of growth, the most important being completing shipment of the first series to our charter members, at which point we determined we will begin to offer individual titles. Perhaps this will ease the situation for those who are concerned more with getting just what they want within their range of preference. The individual album cost will naturally be higher than the subscription price, but if someone only wants two or three titles this may be the best way to go.

But I would also like to play devil's advocate here a little. Quite honestly one of our common threads of discussion over cocktails and steaks about the catalog is that we want to throw a few things in there that folks are not familiar with. I've had the experience myself, for example I was not familiar with Blackjack David, nor the Arnold Overtures before we started the project. Neither is of a genre that I play a lot (I'm mostly a blues and R&B guy if you haven't guessed by now) but I do very much appreciate them and they get frequent play at Chateau Bottlehead now that I have discovered them. I know we all have genres that we could care less about (I don't think you will see a rap tape in our catalog anytime soon, but who knows?), but I would encourage anyone who is limiting themselves to a single genre to get out and explore a bit. There are very moving, well recorded performances in many different genres, and I think one deserves the treat oneself to a new style once in a while.