At Date: Fri, 25 Jun 2004 09:28:45 Bruce wrote:

>The main reason they can't do bonus trax is that many of the majors have
>policies regarding licensing their recordings to third parties where
>agreement is set up to *only* include what was on the original release.
>
>These are done to streamline, I believe, their legal work and make the
>application for many potential licensors easily applied to any of the indie
>labels they work with in licensing their lingering music assets.
>
>A label, like CC(or even Not Lame), *could* add bonus trax, if they really
>wanted to----BUT the minimum amount guaranteed by the licensing label
>increases by a factor of 3+, making the realistic numbers that an
>niche-styled re-issue like this could obtain, well, unobtainable.
>
>Not Lame will be doing, increasingly, some catalog reissues w/ WEA and
>others in the coming years and almost all them will be like this----without
>bonus trax.  But they will have great booklets and liners and sound great.

You make some fine points, Bruce. We tend to go to the bands themselves and 
get the bonus material that they have the rights to (demos, outtakes, live 
tracks). Alas, I have more trouble convincing bands that bonus tracks on 
their precious studio "masterpieces" should be added to augment the 
packages. Klaatu has continually blocked our ability to any bonus material. 
We have a deal in place for a boxed-set and it's taken two years just to get 
them to give me final track list on that because they're afraid of 
committing to material that isn't 100% studio master quality.

Other acts have given me plenty of stuff to work with...including 
memoribilia at no cost. The profit margin gets thinner, but the attraction 
to the consumer is greatly increased.

VERM