dhm wrote:If I were in John Abson's position I would insist on Josq's "Scenario 1" with one important difference:
A guaranteed minimum donation for access and permission to sample under agreed conditions, AND a percentage of all sales. I don't think that would be unreasonable.
The known and respected sample-set producers would almost certainly agree to that, and the amateurs looking to make a quick buck would be shown the door fairly briskly.
I've been kind of following along here and I guess I'd side with Douglas on this one. If a percentage of the sales were not offered to the church (and I find it hard to believe anyone wouldn't be smart enough and maybe even reasonable enough to include this in the deal), I guess I just can't see how any church would even consider it, especially if it comes to a very important and desirable instrument. The folks that have them aren't stupid and they know what they've got, so there has to be some skin in the game.
Case in point: I've attempted over the past few years to approach a few local churches here. One in particular is our local Cathedral of St. Paul, MN who now can boast probably one of the most impressive Skinner organs and in an awesome acoustic anywhere in the upper midwest part of the U.S. and probably then some.
Here's what I ran into. First just to get the time for anyone to even talk to me was a job. The next issue is getting them to understand exactly what Hauptwerk even is and unless you can get them to demo it for themselves first, have the organist come and play along with the decision makers being present so they can understand exactly what Hauptwerk is and how it works, I think you're gonna have an uphill battle on your hands.
Now, assuming you can get that far and everyone likes what they see there's another hurdle, and that's getting access to the instrument for the needed time. I've heard a lot of "we don't know when we'd be able to let you in to sample it" objections. There's security concerns, the idea of someone being there in the middle of the night for who knows how many nights didn't sit well with them, who from the church would be willing to be there at 3 AM to assure things weren't abused, stolen or the wrong people were showing up, it was all too big of a coordinating and security issue with them.
The Cathedral spent over 3 million rebuilding this instrument a few years back so you can see their concerns, other churches with this type of instrument and investment will surely be the same. In all of this, the first steps as far as I'm concerned before anything else happens would be to first convince them that it would be important that they have a virtual copy of the instrument for reference in the case there was ever some kind of catastrophic event that took place requiring a record of how the instrument sounded. And secondly, I'd certainly be offering them early on a substantial cut of the profits, especially when they just dropped 3.5 mil on the instrument. Every church is always looking for donations for certain things and donations to help offset costs of an organ rebuild or for maintenance of the instrument or for other needs and the idea that a flow of revenue would come as a result should certainly be an idea that is pitched early on. Problem is, we can't make any promises, but only guessing here at the number of folks who have now been introduced to Hauptwerk and if it's a good and desirable set, sure nobody's gonna make a million dollars, but I'd think the donation to the church over time would certainly be respectable.
Yes, the person who does the sampling should be compensated, but as pointed out elsewhere here, making a living doing it is maybe not the easiest, but if you can make a living doing it great, because that means the church should do quite well too. But perhaps this part should be more secondary for the producer and doing it more for the love of it should be first.
Marc