MP3s of Orson's radio shows

[Tony]

If anybody's interested, on eBay currently there are MP3s of all of Orson's radio stuff: Mercury; Campbell; Mercury Summer Theatre; The Third Man and the Black Museum. Of course with MP#s, you can fit like 50 hours on each disc; the sound is compressed, but I don't think it matters much with old mono shows. And the MP3s are really cheap; for example, there's a disc with the Harry Lime BBC shows; ALL the shows on one disc, 52 shows!

[Welles Fan]

I ordered a set of three CDs from OTRCat. It's $15 now (and the label says the Orson Wells Collection, LOL), can't remember what I payed a year or so ago, but it's got damned near everything on it. You might want to look there if the bidding gets too high on ebay.

I also ordered Gerald Mohr's Phillip Marlowe series from OTRCat. Good gumshoe/shamus/private dick/wiseguy fun.

[mteal]

MP3 really is an amazing new medium, but when you can get 50 hours of material on one disc, you have to wonder whether it can have any commercial potential or not. One of the nice things about Radio Spirits recent 6-CD set of Welles radio shows is the how clean the sound is (which really brings the shows to life). With Mp3 there may be little financial incentive to do serious restoration work on these old shows, which means we'll be stuck with dull and scratchy sound for many of them.

One commercial possibility I can see for Mp3 tho, is audio books. It would be nice to have an entire book read on one Mp3 disc. Don't know if it'll ever happen, but it sure would be alot less bulky.

[jaime marzol]

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there is a lot of mp3 bashing by companies that claim to have the new, bigger, better deal. i have found no problems with mp3s that a bit of eq-ing could not fix. the capability of storing 150 stereo tunes on one cd, is tremendous.

[mteal]

You're right, it is tromendous to get so much on one disc, and in the MP3s of old Welles radio pgms I've heard, many of them sound great. But I wonder if we'll ever see MP3s sold in stores, and I'm not surprised that certain companies are trying to bash MP3 - I would think it would be a huge threat to the entire music and audio industry. I read an article recently that said an entire generation of young people is growing up now that have little conception of what it's like to actually pay money for music.

Another drawback, in terms of old radio shows, is that many are in bad shape soundwise, and could use some kind of cleaning up (some key Welles radio pgms are barely intelligible). OTR shows are not public domain as many people think they are, but the copyright owners won't bother cleaning them up if there's no money to be made from it. Of course, there's probably not much money to be made from it, and I'm not really sure how much they could clean them up anyway.

[Obssessed_with_Orson]

myself, i'm still wondering how they got the shows to sound so good in that site where we were able to hear them. and for some time, download them.

i tried purchasing from other companies. one here one there. from the same company, one show sounded good, another sounded bad, sent it back, thinking they would fix the problem. which in one place, had nothing to do with the sound recording of the show. but they got upset apparently, and i haven't heard from them yet.

to me, in this day and age, they WANT to sell the product, but they don't WANT to do the work and pay the price it will cost them TO clean them up. in companies, to me, they're not interested in what we want anymore. they're interested in who can make more than the other.

radio spirits is a nice one, but doesn't have too much to choose from of orson.

old radio and nostalgia was awful. i was all excited when i found it, then received the order, and hit the play button. now THAT was bad recording. the show was in the back and the noise was in the front. you could barely hear the show going.
from a different company, they recorded them so bad, i thought i was listening to alvin and the chipmunks. i thought it was the tape player, so i tried a different one. same response.

i don't know. the companies want to sell it, but they want to become billionaires for doing so. probably cost them, what, $1 for the cassette, want to be paid for listening to something that we, not they, are interested in.

they want to pay the tiny fee of getting them all recorded. but they want us to pay a gargantuant fee for it because we like it so much.

i don't know. just guessin'. maybe i'm wrong.

bye now!

[Obssessed_with_Orson]

(and the label says the Orson Wells Collection,[quote][/quote]

bye the way, who do you think is in the lead for spelling his name wrong the most?

bye now!

[mteal]

I would say ebay. There are usually about 300-400 items on sale for "Orson Welles" and then another 70-80 for that shadowy figure known as "Orson Wells". Sometimes the pickens is actually better for Wells then for Welles.

Radio Spirits is usually pretty reliable in terms of sound quality. From what I've read, the owner of RS is apparently trying to use his copyright ownership to get some kind of monopoly on OTR shows. I don't see it happening. The shows are too easy to copy.

I miss playing shows from that Mercury site. Too bad they changed the format.

[jaime marzol]

MTEAL WROTE:
"I read an article recently that said an entire generation of young people is growing up now that have little conception of what it's like to actually pay money for music. "

I REPLY:
absolutely right. new technology will always change the way business is done. the middle-man, the record labels, are now like dinosaurs sinking in the tar pit; their gravy days are over. just like network tv. the future of music business is that you will be able to download most of the band's music for free, they will make their money from performing, which is where the majority of a band's revenue has always come from; performing, and publishing. record sales only enrich the record label, not the artist. Bands will also make money from the fans that want to buy the authorized cd from the band's website; the buyer will get all the tunes, and a bunch of paper, which means that bands will beef up what comes with a cd so that fans buy. it will no longer be that tiny slip of paper that fits in the tiny plastic case, you will get a lot for your money. the more a band tours, the more of the paper heavy cds they will sell, and they can flip-off the record companies.

a record label will pay a band 65 cents per sale, and when the sales die out, they bury your cd, and there is nothing you can do about it because it doesn't belong to you. so you get 65 cents per sale while it's selling, then it's over. if a band owns it's cd, they can push that cd from their website, at 10 bucks a pop, for the next 10 years.

think of the variety of sounds that will be available! it will no longer be a record exec deciding what is good enough to invest in it's distribution. look at woodstock, 1969, before the conglomerates purchased the record companies, each band was different. look at the bands now. they are like a line of jr whoppers at burger king.

conglomeration has done for music what burger king did for the hamburger, made them all exactly the same. in the early 80s, the college grads that took over the record labels, saw that mahilia jackson sold 50,000 records, but motley crue sold 1,500,000 records, and their mentality says, "cut mahelia jackson, and find me 20 more bands just like motley crue."

i think they put their own necks through the noose.

i would not be surprised if in a few years a bunch of music mags come out that cater to bands without a label. bands will buy the space, the mag will run stories, pictures, personal bios, where to download their tunes, where to buy the authorised cd with lots of paper, pictures, video, and their tour schedule.

in 1984 i went to LA to shop 2 records, dealt with artist research guys at MCA, CAPITOL, 2 other labels i don't remember, and a label called BIG DICK RECORDS, yes, BIG DICK RECORDS. we were shopping a female solo, and a rock band. the AR guys at the major labels all had the same exact line, "is the girl like toni basil? do you think she could dance like a cheerleader?" one guy that had signed THE CATHOLIC SCHOOL GIRLS, said, "I have an opening for a singing waitress that can dance like a cheerleader. do you think she would dress up like a waitress?" all this before popping in the tape. on the rock band they asked, "can any of them play a violin? we are looking for an act like Dexy's Midnight Runners." they were not looking for good acts, they had openings for bands that fit a certain bill. BIG DICK RECORDS wanted to know if the girl would show her tits, and on the rock band they said, "hey, this is pretty good stuff, if you guys could go back, rewrite the lyrics, throw in some moans, and some cursing, we might be interested in this stuff."

Ahhhhhhh! we left LA very dissillusioned.

to me, hearing that the labels are sinking, is music to my ears.

same thing will be happening to movie studios. with the coming of mtv, there are whole generations of kids that grew up watching scratchy looking, badly edited, home-made music videos. no big deal to see a whole movie that looks like that. and in a few years, distribution will be on hard drives, not on film, so the cost will be minimal. the big losers will be the movie studios that now control the distribution, and eastman kodak. the big winners will be the filmmakers, and the audience, because of the incredible variety of films that will be available.

imagine the relationship a guy like welles could have had with a station like IFC? it boggles the imagination.

how this relates to OTR? i don't have a clue. i'm finished running off at the mouth now.
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the numbers quoted here are ball park, not researched, exact numbers. they are probably very different now than they were in 1984.

[mteal]

Interesting points, Jaime. Of course, putting a rock band together by commitee goes all the way back to The Monkees in the 60s and probably before that. But then, I pretty much stopped buying rock music back in the mid-80s anyway, so that doesn't really bother me. I respect a band's desire to be independent from the labels, as long as they've got something interesting to say too. Same goes for young filmmakers. But as for consumers, if someone wants to be part of the "herd mentality", let 'em. I suppose teenagers are more susceptible to it, since their brains are not as saturated with herd mentality culture as adult brains are. A rite of passage, perhaps?

I do remember reading years ago about how record companies were under federal investigation for a conspiracy to keep CD prices fixed at around $16. I don't know whatever became of the issue, but it's interesting that 20 years after CDs first came on the market, the price is still the same.

[jaime marzol]

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the herd mentality is alive and well, thanks to mtv. whole generations of white, middle class american kids want to be pimps, and walk, talk, act, and dress llike rappers.

and i don't think that any of this is a band's desire to be free of record companies. it's that they can't get with a record company, so the new technology out there gives them another route. i think any band wants a record label, they just can't get one. musicians like nothing more than to sleep all day and rock all night, and let some one else take care of the business. but it will be different; they have sing, dance, bleach their hair, and thend to their website to sell the cd.

i think it's all for the better. in welles' case, he never connected with an audience because all his films went into limited release, then producers ran cold. welles didn't connect with a mass audience, because his films never reached a mass audience, because of distribution expense. without distribution expense hampering a film, who knows what will hit? a 3-hr film of a little fat girls sitting in a wheatfield reading poertry, could the the next $300,000,000 blockbuster.

[jaime marzol]

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i never heard about the price freeze thing. i have not purchased a cd, except for a few hendrix things that were priced at $25, and $30, in 4 or 5 years. since napster. now it's kaza. it's the only way to get music. you don't have to drive to 6 stores to find what you are looking for.

[mteal]

Jaime, you have more faith in the public then I do. I have my doubts that Welles would have ever been a popular artist even if he had had decent distribution. He actually did have pretty good distribution for THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI. At the time it was virtually impossible to lose money with a Rita Hayworth picture, but Welles once again demonstrated his ability to do the impossible. Of course, he was hired by the studio to do a Rita Hayworth picture and wound up giving them an Orson Welles picture instead. Imagine their surprise.

I think the public considered Welles to be a radio star more then a film star. And then by the 70s, they considered him more a wine salesman then a great director.

[Jeff Wilson]

Getting back to the topic of MP3s: there are any number of old time radio devotees who put a lot of time and effort into restoring shows on their own, but the fact of the matter is this-Welles' stuff, outside Mercury Theater of the Air and Harry Lime, just doesn't seem very popular. From the OTR list I belong to, and the books being written on OTR, much of the fandom adheres to the long-running comedy (Amos 'n Andy, etc), variety (mainly Jack Benny and a couple others) and the genre stuff (cops, thrillers). I get a digest of one mailing list that gets into some pretty esoteric stuff, and in the year-plus I've been on it, Welles has come up only a handful of times, and all of those were in relation to "War of the Worlds."

Further, if there is no financial incentive to restore shows, those who hold official copyright on them won't. And yet further, one must have quality sources to restore from, such as transcription discs. Some shows may survive only in subpar dubs made by fans, rather than taken from quality archive material. Imagine if the Lilly Library's collection of Welles transcription discs was made available for remastering and release. Unfortunately, this isn't cheap. I was told at the Lilly that transferring a transcription disc ran more than a thousand bucks. I don't know if that's true or not, but if it is, imagine this: you get the rights (yet more money) to release these shows, and drop the thousands of dollars to do so. You restore them, make them sound great, and release them in nice packages. Are you inclined to do this again when, shortly after release, your shows have been packaged up in the latest compilation of MP3s on eBay, which I guarantee they will? Of course not. And the way MP3s spread, far fewer people will be inclined to buy your CD set of, say, 25 shows for $50 when they can get 300 shows for $10 on a couple MP3 discs. The quality will be dodgier, but it's obviously a lot cheaper.

Oh, and the guy who owned Radio Spirits sold out to a corporation, so their quality has gone downhill, from what I've read.

[mteal]

I guess most of Welles' radio programs will probably always live in the shadow of the Martians the same way his films live in the shadow of Kane. And that's sort of a vicious cycle: many of Welles' radio series are not known well enough to have any commercial potential, so they remain unknown.

$1000 to transfer a transcription disc?! Wow, that would definitely not be worth it. The last time I was at Lilly I asked them why they had all their radio shows on cassette and reel-to-reel tape instead of CD (they don't even have a reel-to-reel player, so if you want to listen to one of the shows on that storage medium - like the EVERSHARP series - you're SOL). They said that the copyright owners would not allow them to be transferred to CD, because that was too easy to copy, and once they got onto disc, smuggled out the archive, and presumably put on The Net and MP3, they would be essentially worthless, which is true.

I would love to hear the HELLO AMERICANS and CEILING UNLIMITED series in pristine sound, but it ain't likely to happen. I guess we should be happy with what we've got. It is quite a bit.