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On demand or not?

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Today's gripe: print-on-demand bureaucracy.
 
I ordered a piece for my Christmas concert for choir, organ, and trumpet. I placed the order with my usual vendor for the p/v scores and a separate trumpet part. Today (six weeks after I placed the order) I get a phone call saying they can't send me just the trumpet part, because they've switched to a "print on demand" system (meaning they have their music as PDFs and print them out when they're ordered, rather than having inventories of printed music). Their POD system won't let them print just a trumpet part; I have to order a full set of parts (evidently there's a version for trumpet and strings).
 
Pardon my acronymic French, but WTF? What's the whole point of print-on-demand if they can't print what's demanded? What's the point of having a version for trumpet and organ if you can't get a trumpet part? It might make sense if they had sets of parts pre-printed and stored on a shelf all shrink-wrapped. I can see in that case they might not want to break up a set. But when they're printing from a computer file? That's just stupid bureaucracy.
 
Wake up, publishers! Do you want to exist ten years from now? You've got to cut this kind of crap out. Your competition is instant delivery on the web. Taking six weeks to tell me that you can't deliver my part for a totally nonsensical reason is cutting your own throat. Why would I do business with you in the future? Why should composers sign contracts with you if you're going to make their music hard to get?
 
And can you spell "incentive to make my own trumpet part"? Go ahead, sue me.

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Comments

  1. I am waiting for three trumpet parts for one piece for my October 30 concert.  I checked this morning and it’s still “pending”…..I ordered it in early August…..and last week they told me it would ship in four weeks.  Grrrr.  I will be using good high school players from a wonderful band program but they’re KIDS and I want them to have the flippin’ parts so they can practice it for at least a few weeks before they come to rehearse with me.  The parts are in the choral octavo and I was thinking about transposing etc. so they have SOMETHING to work on until the “real” parts get here.  I was feeling guilty for thinking about doing that……but now, not so much.
     
    Nice picture, Allen.  Reminds me of my husband before coffee!
     
    Marie

  2. I’ve encountered this with UNC jazz press, which often has a 16-copy minimum. Since my jazz group is one-on-a-part, there’s only five singers, so getting 16 copies is enormously expensive and wasteful.

  4. That *is* appalling. I suspect that some poor admin or manager doesn’t know how to select which pages you want to print using the pdf print interface. So the answer you get is “they’re all in one file… can’t print one part”.  Silly.

  5. My favorite is the minimum order of 20 copies. Most often of an obscure piece from an onscure foregin publisher, though they are by no means the only practitioners of this form of interference with free trade. How am I supposed to decide to do the piece? Often they will send the first 1-2 pages…what does that tell me? Voicing…that’s about it. Plus, 20 copies? Have they not heard of chamber choirs? 16 voices…c’mon.
     
    They are making it easier to justify photocopying, not the opposite.

  6. Allen – Behold the insanity of the publishing world.  This is why they will be out of business – the whole kit and kaboodle – in ten years or less, I predict.  This is not just in music publishing; it’s all across the board.  It is, however, the insanity of those people with little bitty minds who cannot and WILL not see beyond the edge of their cubicle.  I’m an old “pencil-and-paper” warrior – I came into the Army back in the mid-seventies, and we didn’t have computers and all.  Yet, when I suggested in the early nineties to some young officers that with the computers and systems we had available we needed to get to be as paperless as possible, to save space and make it easier to operate, it was the younger one who resisted – because “we didn’t do it that way in his last unit.”  This lack of creativity and thoughtfulness is why America’s in such financial trouble – we have to wake up.  We had become fat and comfortable in our inefficiencies while the much hungrier world around us decided that it could do things better, faster, cheaper.  Now our economy’s in the tank, and we’re running around screaming “the world is ending! the world is ending!”.  The accurate statement should be “OUR world is ending” – and it should because we need to get lean and hungry and stop depending on these idiocies to do our work, whatever it happens to be.  Been reading Gordon Wood’s “The Empire of Liberty” – and looking at the descriptions of the beginnings of this country back in the 19th century and the sheer unmitigated hunger and willingness to fail – aha! – while pursuing something is what differentiates then from now.  And unfortunately, your last comment put the exclamation point on the whole problem:  the law is not designed to help people to do what they need to do, but to prevent it in the name of “protection.”  Well, a certain amount of protection is necessary; but the reality is that it tends to ossify processes that need to be fluid and responsive, but are protecting their almighty buck!  Thanks for the opportunity to rant!
     
    Ron – a frustrated patriot

  7. Great post, Allen.  I still don’t understand why they can’t print out the trumpet part.
     
    And why even hide them behind a price wall?  Is the 5-10 dollars they make every year from the brass parts really that significant?

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