Based on a comment from the SC board, SC now prints in UK and pays UK royalty rates.
http://www.soundchoice.com/ubb/ultimate ... 1;t=001124
(straight from SC studio spokesman).
The rates for royalties in the uk come to 12 pence or about $0.19 a song. These licences do NOT require approval of songwriters/artists.
http://www.prsformusic.com/SiteCollecti ... _TandC.pdf
That means for royalties it only costs SC 2.85 a disk to re-publish an out of print CD. The cost to press a CD and print the artwork+sleve is only about $1.50-$2 a disk even when printing only 100 disks.
example:
http://www.high-techproductions.com/cdduplication.htm
Throw in inventory and shipping it costs SC only about $6 to bring back one of their out of print CDs. They sell the disks for $22.95, retail, but on discounts they probably sell them wholsale for about $10.
So for any out of print disk they can make $4-12 for each copy sold.
By my count they have 634 disks that are out of print, and at least half of those are at least moderately to very difficult to obtain anywhere.
If they printed/sold just 500 copies on average of each of their out of print disks they could make $2,500 per disk x600 disks or about 1.5 million dollars.
I am convinced that based on my effort to obtain many of their out of print disks there is a market out there that could easily absorb on average 500 copies of most of these disks, and many more for some.
I bet they could sell 2000 copies of the eagles disk if they re-published it under UK law.
I have given up hope on SC making new songs, but I am annoyed that they are holding onto a lot of songs that I would like to have but are very difficult to legally obtain (but painfully easy to illegaly obtain).
I suspect that SC is more interested in the lawsuit as a source of income than providing a product and stopping publication of many titles that are in high demand actually encourages pirates. (and they know this).