poco a poco
I'm Jim
Well back then that was the case. They thought vinyl was on the way out and CD's were the future so it wasn't worth doing themselves, but they were happy to make some money by selling limited volume licences to others who thought they could make a profit selling more expensive better quality vinyl masterings and pressings to the audiophile market.
But things have now changed CD's are now on the way out replaced by streaming to the wider market and vinyl has seen a very good resurgence. The Tone Poet's have demonstrated (a bit to there own surprise I think given they started with very limited runs and only for a year trial) to large companies, particularly Universal with great back catalogues, that while still not massive market sellers they are now able to generate a healthly profit given premium prices and sales eventually up to around 10,000 copies for each release. To make any profits from licences for streaming you need really very much higher numbers streamed or downloaded.
Joe Harley is already working on releases for 2023 so TP's seem unlikely to finish soon. Music Matters are now selling copies from a little capacity on the remainder of their licenses in the $100 -$125 range! The one year run of the cheaper BN80's sold well and has encouraged Universal further. I expect the also cheaper BN Classics are being sold in much higher numbers than the TP's, but they need to improve the quality control or they could kill 'the golden goose' like with the BN75's. Verve (again Universal) have joined this market and other big labels are reported to be interested (Decca for one).
One caviate is these pretty much all seem to be for the Jazz Market with Jazz having one of its up periods, but some of us have seen this interest wax and wane previously over the years.
For me though, I want a few of the classic BN albums as I've only got the RGV series CDs in many cases, because that was all that was available at the time I was buying.
