Hey, hey, it's the merry month of May… Wait a minute… No it isn't - it's June!!!

As you may have noticed, there was no News-Letter in May; the reason for this was very simple… There was nothing new to report!!! Due to a mistake, there were no new CD releases from Sting and Snow on the April Hanhurst's Service - which makes it the first time in more than ten years that we had nothing at all on the review! However, we are trying to make up for it; we have re-released four titles (available on CD, for the first time) on the May review (the titles of these are listed below - if you haven't already read them in the e-mail). These tracks are made available for the first time in the "physical-digital" medium of CD (where MP3s are the "virtual-digital" medium). If you have a moment, please listen to them and if you like them, please buy them!

On a slightly more serious note, I have to tell you that - on the basis of the actual sales figures, over the last 18 months - I can see no way that we can continue with the production of Vinyl for new music. However, we do still intend to release new music - and hope to get back to full production, as soon as possible - BUT - in future, it will only be available in Digital formats as we cannot "carry" the cost of vinyl production any longer.

At the risk of being "boring", I would like to offer an insight to why we are taking this action by providing a few details. Here are some facts (not a whole page - just "both ends" of the Sting and Snow Records' story):

This is despite the outstanding efforts of Tom Dillander to keep the cost of Vinyl production as low as he can (in case you didn't know, he bought a pressing plant and now masters and presses Vinyl at his own facility); there has always been a real question as to how long we could continue with Vinyl production and - I can tell you now that - if it wasn't for Tom, we would have quit Vinyl production in 2005.

In reality, even with Tom's help, we probably should have ended Vinyl production four or five years ago - had we simply expected Vinyl to "pay for it's self" - but we allowed the "overall" sales (in Vinyl, CD and MP3) of our new and old music to carry the cost of maintaining Vinyl production. Sadly, we are now past the point where this happens; we have lost thousands of Dollars over the last 18 months, so it's time for us to say a very sad "goodbye" to Vinyl…

What about older titles - will these also cease to be available on Vinyl?
For the moment re-pressings are still viable; where the pressing plates still exist, older tunes can be re-pressed at a reasonable cost - but we do need to sell at least 25 copies to be able to "break-even". We will monitor these sales and will continue to "re-press", as necessary, while the demand continues to be sufficient to cover the costs.

An "observation" on the suggested implications of the sales figures, shown above:
The really curious thing, which I had not realised until I extracted these figures for this News-Letter, is that the number of average unit sales for Digital media has not increased, in real terms, during the period that I have been running the company, which seems very odd… This has to imply that Callers who stopped buying Vinyl also stopped buying new music altogether - is that possible? Whilst I accept that there has been a significant "shift" to the use of CDs and MP3s, accelerated by the appearance of the Lap Top Computer as the "primary" music source, I would have expected the Digital sales to have grown to fill, at least, part of the gap left as a result in the fall in Vinyl sales; clearly this hasn't happened which seems irreconcilable. Any ideas???

Now for the other news:

NEW CD RELEASES - also available on MP3 & Vinyl (in most cases) / (May 2010):
Rose Garden -SIR 602 - Vocal by Jack Borgström
Rock 'N' Roll Music - SIR 309 - Vocal by Al Stevens
My Very Own Lucky Star - SNW 702 - Vocal by Maarten Weijers
Heaven - SNW 902 - Vocal by Wil Stans

INDIVIDUAL RECORD HISTORIES including ALL THE ADDITIONAL LYRICS:
To find these, just click on the book symbol next to the title on the Catalogue, Future Releases or Latest Releases pages.

If you want to hear how these top-selling recordings sound, just click on the musical note symbol

Go Squareful! - Paul Bristow (Owner and Producer Sting and Snow Records)