Saturday, September 05, 2009
Look out licensing houses, here comes Seth!
PRODUCER’S PERSPECTIVE: "One of the most popular business bloggers in the world took a swing at the theatrical licensing agents yesterday, with this blog about a non-pro production of Grease that cost the theater company $3k in royalties to put on."
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6 comments:
It is kind of amazing that a company could charge that much just because they know that they can. I would understand a little bit more but not that much more that a successful show. so i think that people should stop getting the right for these type of shows and that would force them to lower there prices down to some thing that would be good.
I understand that Grease is one of those shows that seems guaranteed to put people in seats, but I always assumed that not for profit organizations were, well, not for profit so that when it came down to paying for things like rights the price might be a little less just so the show could be shown. I'm a little surprised that given the price that rights cost for something like Greece the show gets shown at all at this point, despite being a cash cow and then some.
The cost of the rights doesn't surprise me at all even though I hate how high it is. The company who holds the rights to "Grease" knows that there is a great demand to put on this show, and people will fork over the money because they need to put people in the seats. The $3000 cost has evolved from the need of the consuming theatres, and not solely from the greed of the rights holders. I like Seth's recommendation about making a buying cartel and negotiating as a group instead of just as small individual companies that doesn't have very many bargaining chips. In an ideal world, I would hope that the high prices would result in the use of newer works, but too bad the audience has so many expectations.
I found the post that this one was criticizing to be much more interesting. To my mind, the basic problem here - as in so many other places today- is that a few companies have a great deal of power, and consumers are not exerting their rights effectively. The idea of schools and other not-for-profits bargaining collectively with the rights holders is good - it would make the consumers as powerful as the companies. However, in my ideal world, it would be far preferable for the companies to be allowed less power in the first place. Part of this may come back to the ongoing debate about a change in copyright law, but Mr. Godin may well also be right with his suggestion that there is a deliberate anti-competitive attitude among the rights holders. This kind of collusion is present in so many industries today, but the enforcement and/or legislation are so weak that we rarely see any change.
I think this creates a dilemna for a lot of schools/nonprofit groups. It was definitely an issue for my high school 2 years ago. We tried to keep everything as low budget as possible, and that definitely affected our choices. I don't think choice of show should be so limited by budget, so that more options can be explored. I don't think it's the responsibility of the groups to collectively work together, because it's not their fault in any way, except for choosing shows with historically better success often versus taking a gamble.
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