Live in Concert: 50th Anniversary DVD and Blu-ray.

[Lowbacca]

This DVD is terrific (think "Shine a Light" if Scorcese was in the middle of a major coke binge) and anyone who won't spend a measly $11 on 70 minutes (21 songs) of live (though well-polished) Beach Boys music really has no business hanging out on a Beach Boys message board in the first place.

Wow. Just.... wow.  I don't even know how to respond to that.

[Bubba Ho-Tep]

My point exactly.

[HeyJude]

I think a better way maybe to put it is that most anybody that likes the Beach Boys enough to be on this board would almost surely like this new video release enough to purchase it.

I mean, we can stand on principal regarding the editing of the show, but then we'd have to toss just about every live BB release ever, but I can't think of anything other than a lack of the rest of the setlist as a really compelling reason to adamently dislike this video release. These things are never edited just the way I'd like (though some come close).

[Wirestone]

This DVD is terrific (think "Shine a Light" if Scorcese was in the middle of a major coke binge) and anyone who won't spend a measly $11 on 70 minutes (21 songs) of live (though well-polished) Beach Boys music really has no business hanging out on a Beach Boys message board in the first place.

Wow. Just.... wow.  I don't even know how to respond to that.

He's right, you know.

[Justin]

I've watched this DVD since I got it and it's only gotten better with each viewing.

Sure, it pains me to see them run back to their places for "Heroes and Villians" when I know they just cut them performing "Add Some Music To Your Day" ( ) but nevertheless the DVD is a great snapshot of a fantastic tour.  It looks fantastic...the picture and colors are vibrant and whether Mike's processed vocals grate the ears...there's no denying that this DVD presents the Beach Boys in the best possible light.  They all look and sound great.  After watching Zeppelin's latest DVD, "Celebration Day", it's hard to accept that all we get is a 68 minute concert DVD from the Beach Boys but I guess that's how it goes.  It'd be amazing if this was re-released one day in an expanded edition.  That would be so great...to have a fuller show than these scraps.  Ok....trying to stay positive.

All in all, many great moments throughout the DVD....and it totally doesn't deserve the 2 or 3 whatever stars it's been rated on Amazon. 

[Cabinessenceking]

I've watched this DVD since I got it and it's only gotten better with each viewing.

Sure, it pains me to see them run back to their places for "Heroes and Villians" when I know they just cut them performing "Add Some Music To Your Day" ( ) but nevertheless the DVD is a great snapshot of a fantastic tour.  It looks fantastic...the picture and colors are vibrant and whether Mike's processed vocals grate the ears...there's no denying that this DVD presents the Beach Boys in the best possible light.  They all look and sound great.  After watching Zeppelin's latest DVD, "Celebration Day", it's hard to accept that all we get is a 68 minute concert DVD from the Beach Boys but I guess that's how it goes.  It'd be amazing if this was re-released one day in an expanded edition.  That would be so great...to have a fuller show than these scraps.  Ok....trying to stay positive.

All in all, many great moments throughout the DVD....and it totally doesn't deserve the 2 or 3 whatever stars it's been rated on Amazon. 

so....it deserves 1-2 stars?

[SloopJohnnyB]

The bad rating on Amazon is not a hit on the Beach Boys or the tour. It sends a message that people want the complete show on DVD, not an edited version. In that case it does deserve a poor rating.

If the single disc DVD is selling for $11.99 then why not put out a three DVD set for $29.99 and include the entire show? I would hope that many of us would pony up and pay the higher price for a complete show.

I support the Beach Boys and buy their products. If sales are up then maybe we'll see more. Is this not one of your favorite bands? Buy the product! That being said I have no problem with the complaints and criticism. Give the fans what they want.

[southbay]

When the band were in the Land of Oz, over a few drinks I got to chat with Marc and Mark from the film crew and they told me that they were producing three video productions from footage garnered from the tour. This is release number one, there are more to come.

Doin' it Again wasn't number one?  It was put out by the same production team. 

[TonyW]

I was not talking about the "Doin' It Again" DVD - I was talking about the product titled "Live In Concert: 50th Anniversary" DVD as per the thread title and which is the new product recently released.

[AndrewHickey]

The bad rating on Amazon is not a hit on the Beach Boys or the tour. It sends a message that people want the complete show on DVD, not an edited version. In that case it does deserve a poor rating.

If the single disc DVD is selling for $11.99 then why not put out a three DVD set for $29.99 and include the entire show? I would hope that many of us would pony up and pay the higher price for a complete show.

It doesn't deserve a poor rating at all. Just because someone wants something other than the product being sold is no reason for them to give that product a bad rating.

As for the latter question -- the songwriting royalties for a full 60-song set would be somewhere in the region of $600,000. The amount of money that would go to the production company from a $30 DVD is around $12. The most successful BBs DVD ever, sales-wise, is the Knebworth DVD. In its first six years, that only just managed to sell 50,000 copies -- and it cost a lot less than $30.

No matter how much we'd like it, a full-show DVD simply isn't economically viable.

[Pretty Funky]

Andrew. You seem to be the go to guy on these costs. Like many here, while the DVD is important, I'm more into what the live album will consist of. What kind of money do you think would have changed hands for the rights on Al's Vegas CD which I recall was a DIY project?

[southbay]

I was not talking about the "Doin' It Again" DVD - I was talking about the product titled "Live In Concert: 50th Anniversary" DVD as per the thread title and which is the new product recently released.

Yes, I know that.  Sometimes a person simply wants to ask a genuine question of another poster without getting into a pi**ing contest with them. I can read the
thread title and was aware you were referring to the fact that Live in Concert 50 was the first of three DVD releases using concert footage from the recent tour. My question simply was, since the same production team released "Doin it Again", which included concert footage from the 50th tour, is it possible that Doin it Again would not have been the first of the three such DVD releases to which you were referring? Just an honest question.

[AndrewHickey]

Andrew. You seem to be the go to guy on these costs. Like many here, while the DVD is important, I'm more into what the live album will consist of. What kind of money do you think would have changed hands for the rights on Al's Vegas CD which I recall was a DIY project?

Firstly, I don't want to pretend to any greater knowledge than I have -- I've just read up on the music business a bit, I have no insider knowledge, and there are probably better-informed people.

But that said, CDs and DVDs are very different. For a DVD you have to pay the publisher 'sync rights', which can basically cost as much as the market can bear. These start in the thousands of dollars per song for even relatively unpopular songs. Try to license California Girls for your DVD and you're talking in the tens of thousands. (Note that I'm talking here about US rules -- EU law is somewhat different, and changed since I last read up on this, so it may be possible for something to come out in Europe but not the US, though I doubt it).

CDs, though, are covered by mechanical licensing, which is different -- there is a legal maximum that can be charged for the use of a song on a CD, which is 9.1 cents per copy for songs 5 minutes or less  or 1.75 cents per minute or fraction thereof, per copy for songs over 5 minutes.

So a 60-song concert DVD would involve paying an upfront cost of (very roughly) $600,000, and then trying to earn that back. A 60-song live CD would involve paying the publishing companies $5.46 per album sold -- and that's assuming the publishing company wouldn't negotiate a lower rate, which they may well do.

For Al's Vegas CD, then, which had 26 songs on, he would just have had to pay about $2 (rates have gone up in the intervening ten years, obviously) per copy in publishing royalties.

(Note that here I'm only talking about *songwriting* royalties -- you would pay maybe $20,000 to use the *song* California Girls in your DVD, but you'd have to pay a separate fee to the performers/record company for the actual recording. For a live CD/DVD that's probably a fixed fee, though, and more songs doesn't equal more money in that respect).

[TonyW]

I was not talking about the "Doin' It Again" DVD - I was talking about the product titled "Live In Concert: 50th Anniversary" DVD as per the thread title and which is the new product recently released.

Yes, I know that.  Sometimes a person simply wants to ask a genuine question of another poster without getting into a pi**ing contest with them. I can read the
thread title and was aware you were referring to the fact that Live in Concert 50 was the first of three DVD releases using concert footage from the recent tour. My question simply was, since the same production team released "Doin it Again", which included concert footage from the 50th tour, is it possible that Doin it Again would not have been the first of the three such DVD releases to which you were referring? Just an honest question.

No pissing contest here, just posting too early on a Sunday morning with the comprehension radar on low. Best I can say was at the time of the discussion the Doin' It Again DVD had already been released and the discussion was about the work they were doing now.

[SloopJohnnyB]

The bad rating on Amazon is not a hit on the Beach Boys or the tour. It sends a message that people want the complete show on DVD, not an edited version. In that case it does deserve a poor rating.

If the single disc DVD is selling for $11.99 then why not put out a three DVD set for $29.99 and include the entire show? I would hope that many of us would pony up and pay the higher price for a complete show.

It doesn't deserve a poor rating at all. Just because someone wants something other than the product being sold is no reason for them to give that product a bad rating.

As for the latter question -- the songwriting royalties for a full 60-song set would be somewhere in the region of $600,000. The amount of money that would go to the production company from a $30 DVD is around $12. The most successful BBs DVD ever, sales-wise, is the Knebworth DVD. In its first six years, that only just managed to sell 50,000 copies -- and it cost a lot less than $30.

No matter how much we'd like it, a full-show DVD simply isn't economically viable.

I don't know. It's like paying money to go to a sporting event and them being criticized for booing your home team. You payed the money you should be able to express your opinion.

I agree the DVD doesn't deserve a poor rating but the fans should have their right to express their displeasure with the final product.

Maybe(?) the cost would be high to produce the entire show but this is the 50th Anniversary and the show was incredibly successful. Promote, promote , promote! Do the QVC home shopping network. Sell it in Readers Digest. Do a limited mini tour in the summer. They would have a great product there.

I wasn't on any of the boards when Knebworth was released. I hadn't read anything about it. I just found it in the BB bin one day. No special tour. No promotion that I can remember. This would be very different.

[the professor]

Some stunning statistics by Andrew.  I wonder why they spend the time and effort to do all the filming of complete shows with no intention of release? Is it just to have a great corpus of live filming for historical reasons and to dip into from time to time to sell and licence for various products? 100s of hours of the BB shows must be filmed, and one would imagine that the complexities of licencing fees could be negotiated for the sake of releasing a definitive record of the events(s). We are speaking to history here, and surely someone can work both art and profit together to do justice to the tour.

Is there any further word on the live album? This would at least delight us as a fullish show while we wait and hope for a full video.

best to all

[AndrewHickey]

The bad rating on Amazon is not a hit on the Beach Boys or the tour. It sends a message that people want the complete show on DVD, not an edited version. In that case it does deserve a poor rating.

If the single disc DVD is selling for $11.99 then why not put out a three DVD set for $29.99 and include the entire show? I would hope that many of us would pony up and pay the higher price for a complete show.

It doesn't deserve a poor rating at all. Just because someone wants something other than the product being sold is no reason for them to give that product a bad rating.

As for the latter question -- the songwriting royalties for a full 60-song set would be somewhere in the region of $600,000. The amount of money that would go to the production company from a $30 DVD is around $12. The most successful BBs DVD ever, sales-wise, is the Knebworth DVD. In its first six years, that only just managed to sell 50,000 copies -- and it cost a lot less than $30.

No matter how much we'd like it, a full-show DVD simply isn't economically viable.

I don't know. It's like paying money to go to a sporting event and them being criticized for booing your home team. You payed the money you should be able to express your opinion.

I agree the DVD doesn't deserve a poor rating but the fans should have their right to express their displeasure with the final product.

Most of the bad reviews were posted before the DVD was even released, by people who said they had no intention of buying the DVD.

[AndrewHickey]

Some stunning statistics by Andrew.  I wonder why they spend the time and effort to do all the filming of complete shows with no intention of release? Is it just to have a great corpus of live filming for historical reasons and to dip into from time to time to sell and licence for various products? 100s of hours of the BB shows must be filmed, and one would imagine that the complexities of licencing fees could be negotiated for the sake of releasing a definitive record of the events(s). We are speaking to history here, and surely someone can work both art and profit together to do justice to the tour.

Well, firstly, we don't *know* that there's no full-show DVD planned -- it just seems extremely likely, given the costs involved, the fact that no-one in the organisation has said they're going to do it, and the fact that some people who've spoken to the production teams have said that they're planning documentary-style things rather than full-show DVDs. It's possible that if, for example, this DVD sells ten times the amount projected, one might suddenly look a lot more profitable.

However, they didn't film *that* many shows professionally, and if they're doing something along the lines of the Brian Wilson On Tour DVD then they'd want at least some footage of several shows. If you're filming the show anyway, why *not* film the full thing? You might have intended to use, say, Then I Kissed Her from the first filmed show for the documentary, but then Al messes up his lyrics so you can't use that -- but then it turns out that Dave does an absolutely spectacular solo on Surfin' USA, which you were planning to film on show three. It makes sense to record several entire shows even if you only plan to use a few minutes from each.

[Pretty Funky]

Andrew. You seem to be the go to guy on these costs. Like many here, while the DVD is important, I'm more into what the live album will consist of. What kind of money do you think would have changed hands for the rights on Al's Vegas CD which I recall was a DIY project?

Firstly, I don't want to pretend to any greater knowledge than I have -- I've just read up on the music business a bit, I have no insider knowledge, and there are probably better-informed people.

But that said, CDs and DVDs are very different. For a DVD you have to pay the publisher 'sync rights', which can basically cost as much as the market can bear. These start in the thousands of dollars per song for even relatively unpopular songs. Try to license California Girls for your DVD and you're talking in the tens of thousands. (Note that I'm talking here about US rules -- EU law is somewhat different, and changed since I last read up on this, so it may be possible for something to come out in Europe but not the US, though I doubt it).

CDs, though, are covered by mechanical licensing, which is different -- there is a legal maximum that can be charged for the use of a song on a CD, which is 9.1 cents per copy for songs 5 minutes or less  or 1.75 cents per minute or fraction thereof, per copy for songs over 5 minutes.

So a 60-song concert DVD would involve paying an upfront cost of (very roughly) $600,000, and then trying to earn that back. A 60-song live CD would involve paying the publishing companies $5.46 per album sold -- and that's assuming the publishing company wouldn't negotiate a lower rate, which they may well do.

For Al's Vegas CD, then, which had 26 songs on, he would just have had to pay about $2 (rates have gone up in the intervening ten years, obviously) per copy in publishing royalties.

(Note that here I'm only talking about *songwriting* royalties -- you would pay maybe $20,000 to use the *song* California Girls in your DVD, but you'd have to pay a separate fee to the performers/record company for the actual recording. For a live CD/DVD that's probably a fixed fee, though, and more songs doesn't equal more money in that respect).

Thanks for the reply. At a quick count I count over 20 songs on the Al CD which were played this year by the group. Add in songs Brian has done on his live CD's  plus new songs like TWGMTR and IIT (which surely they have the live rights too) and the number of potential tracks is getting up there. You also mention licensing costs could be different outside the US so a 'Live At The Royal Albert Hall' (produced in the UK) may be less than say a 'Live At The Hollywood Bowl' (produced in the US). Am I reading that correctly?

Of course the rights to covers such as 'Fools?' may mean they are priced out but does the rights to Wilson/ Love songs cost the same as they would to another artist, or in other words, do Brian and Mike get a discount to their own songs? Also can they negotiate a bulk lot as in say 40 songs at a better price than 40 artists wanting 1 song each?

Sorry if this is out of your league but like most here we hope for a good product next year with as many tracks as possible.

[AndrewHickey]

Thanks for the reply. At a quick count I count over 20 songs on the Al CD which were played this year by the group. Add in songs Brian has done on his live CD's  plus new songs like TWGMTR and IIT (which surely they have the live rights too) and the number of potential tracks is getting up there. You also mention licensing costs could be different outside the US so a 'Live At The Royal Albert Hall' (produced in the UK) may be less than say a 'Live At The Hollywood Bowl' (produced in the US). Am I reading that correctly?

Of course the rights to covers such as 'Fools?' may mean they are priced out but does the rights to Wilson/ Love songs cost the same as they would to another artist, or in other words, do Brian and Mike get a discount to their own songs? Also can they negotiate a bulk lot as in say 40 songs at a better price than 40 artists wanting 1 song each?

Sorry if this is out of your league but like most here we hope for a good product next year with as many tracks as possible.

For a CD release, *everyone* has the right to record versions of those songs, at the 9.1 cent per copy price. It may well be possible to negotiate a lower rate than that with the publishing companies, but there are no real permission or cost problems for a CD release so long as it can sell enough copies to justify $5.46 or so in publishing royalties -- so it might be at a higher price than other CDs, but not especially so. Brian and Mike don't own the publishing rights to most of their songs, so they don't really affect this.

For a DVD release, again it's entirely possible that an agreement between the DVD and publishing companies could be arranged, a 'bulk lot' as you put it -- but the starting position for the publishing company would be an average of $10,000 or so per song, and that would be what they would be negotiating from. And the other previously-existing live recordings don't enter into it.

Put it this way. Say tomorrow *I* decided to release a live CD and DVD of myself singing those songs -- Andrew Hickey Sings The Beach Boys, Live In His Front Room. I could release the CD immediately at a cost to myself of $5.46, because only one copy would ever be made, as nobody would be fool enough to buy it. I, or you, or anyone, has the right to do that.

For a US DVD release, though, I'd have to negotiate the rights to every song with the publishing company, and it wouldn't matter (much) to them that I had a very, very low expected sales rate -- they could refuse to let me use the songs at all, and they could charge me whatever they liked. And it wouldn't matter if I'd already released five other DVDs with those songs on (Andrew Hickey Sings The Beach Boys Live In His Garden, Andrew Hickey Sings The Beach Boys Live In His Shower and so on), it would be a new negotiation.

I do know that the laws regarding to using music on DVDs in the UK changed at some point in the last decade, but I don't know exactly how -- I just know that some TV shows which were originally released in edited versions because they had Beatles songs in the background that they couldn't get a license for got reissued with the Beatles music on, because they could suddenly get a license under the new law.

[southbay]

I was not talking about the "Doin' It Again" DVD - I was talking about the product titled "Live In Concert: 50th Anniversary" DVD as per the thread title and which is the new product recently released.

Yes, I know that.  Sometimes a person simply wants to ask a genuine question of another poster without getting into a pi**ing contest with them. I can read the
thread title and was aware you were referring to the fact that Live in Concert 50 was the first of three DVD releases using concert footage from the recent tour. My question simply was, since the same production team released "Doin it Again", which included concert footage from the 50th tour, is it possible that Doin it Again would not have been the first of the three such DVD releases to which you were referring? Just an honest question.

No pissing contest here, just posting too early on a Sunday morning with the comprehension radar on low. Best I can say was at the time of the discussion the Doin' It Again DVD had already been released and the discussion was about the work they were doing now.

gotcha

[Pretty Funky]

Thanks for taking the time again Andrew. Interesting stuff and fingers crossed for a worthy live album of the C50.

[halblaineisgood]

.

[NHC]

No Surfer Girl?  No Surfin' USA?  Huh? did I miss something again?

[Awesoman]

This DVD is terrific (think "Shine a Light" if Scorcese was in the middle of a major coke binge) and anyone who won't spend a measly $11 on 70 minutes (21 songs) of live (though well-polished) Beach Boys music really has no business hanging out on a Beach Boys message board in the first place.

Wow. Just.... wow.  I don't even know how to respond to that.

Then it's best that you don't.  The fact that the DVD is pretty bare-bones and cuts out half of the concert is a fair criticism.  I think everyone on here is in agreement that we'd prefer the entire concert.  That being said, what exactly are you hoping to accomplish by not buying it.  Too proud?  This is better than nothing.