How publishers encourage copying of music

[Michael Bush]

Book publishers don't do this nearly so much anymore, because of print on demand. Many books that would have been out of print fifteen years ago are not. The publishers and distributors don't have any on hand, but you can go to the publisher's web site and order one, and they'll have it manufactured for you. There is a delay compared to the old days when all they had to do was call it from the warehouse. But you get it, and in fairly short order.

Why don't music publishers do this?

[Dan Schultz]

Buy only from Barnhouse and there won't be any such thing as 'out of print'.

[derrenba]

I guess I should have expanded in my original post.

That was my point: with sheet music stored in computer files (whether some structural file, or just a scan), there really need not ever be "out of print" in the sense of the pre-digital world.

I mean, we're not taking millions of copies, in most cases. It is totally feasible-- even for old works. There are firms that specialize in scanning documents, and it can be done amazingly cheaply.

DG

Most publishers are probably moving in that direction for their current catalogs. The problem is the now out-of-print stuff that they, for one reason or another, no longer have access to.

And, given the ever-evolving standards of both data storage and data encoding schemes, even scanning or storing to computer is no guarantee of future availability (e.g., if anyone has a working IBM 729 Mark V tape drive lying around, NASA could use your help in retrieving data from the Lunar Orbiter and Apollo missions that they never got around to analyzing).

[BVD Press]

Which piece was it?

Comments coming after I know the piece, but it will include various reasons why a piece goes out of print and how I have rescued a few.

[Michael Bush]

I've got one: James Curnow's *Tates Creek Overture,* 1980. I applied for permission to make a copy. They said they didn't control the rights. So I reached out to Curnow himself. No reply. We went ahead and copied it, and we'll just report the performance of it. Obviously no one with any claim on the rights cares. But we would gladly have bought it or paid a (reasonable) fee.

[pgym]

P.S. Interesting that a library can retain a physical copy of out of print music.

Not really a big deal.

First Sale exhaustion of rights grants the purchaser, be it an individual or an institution, ownership of a lawfully made copy of a copyrighted work, even if the rights holder withdraws the work from circulation. (This is also the case for any copies purchased by music stores, but not to copies placed in a store on spec.)

I received an email response from Hal Leonard, earlier today. They said they destroy all out of print music because copyright law prohibits them from retaining any archival copies of any out of print music.

I suspect that's some customer service rep's over-simplification of Hal Leonard's policy.

I haven't looked at Hal Leonard's standard contract recently, but composer's/arranger's contracts typically contain a clause allowing the composer/arranger to reclaim the copyright from the publisher after contractually specified period of non-publication. At that point, all rights to the work, including the right to make and distribute copies of the work, revert to the composer/arranger, rendering any unsold copies in the publisher's inventory non-lawful copies.

It doesn't make sense from a financial standpoint for the publisher to retain copies of the work since they no longer have the right to sell or otherwise distribute them (unless they first purchase the copies from the rights holder, but the only reason to do that is because they believe they can continue to make money selling the work; but if they believe they can continue to make money selling the work, it wouldn't make sense to allow the copyright to revert to the composer/arranger in the first place). Destroying the existing copies allows them to write off the cost against their taxes.

[BVD Press]

Music can go out of print for many reasons. A few of the most common are:

1. Sales are low
2. A company is purchased for a strategic reason and then pieces are pulled. For example, a company buys a smaller company and has similar titles therefore it axes a bunch of them so they do not compete with their own publications
3. A company is going in a different direction
4. It costs too much to reproduce
5. Sometimes they just cannot find a copy or files

In the world today, we have no reason to put pieces out of print if there are files. If hard copies, it may not be worth entering or scanning in the music. Going backwards is always hard.

In regards to the Curnow piece, Hal Leonard distributes the music so they are correct. It might make sense to contact Curnow Music Press directly but it looks like they did not reply. This is an issue with so many publishing companies. There is just not enough time in a day to get everything done.