The Reel Truth by Reed Martin

Author:Reed Martin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571211036
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

HOW MUCH IS ENOUGH?

First- and second-time filmmakers often don’t know how much they should budget for music, especially since their initial DV or HD budgets may be under $50,000. Others wrongly think they don’t need to budget for tunes because a record company will defer the costs of the music and recoup whatever they need when the soundtrack (of course there has to be a soundtrack) makes a ton of money. Still others explain to investors that music clearances will be free after their film resurrects a classic rock act in the way the studio-produced Reality Bites brought back interest in the Knack and made the band’s 1979 single “My Sharona” a camp hit in the mid-’90s.

Unfortunately, this is one of the biggest myths going. From January to August 2008, Juno reached still less than a third of Pulp Fiction’s total. Soundtrack sales have suffered with the overall downturn in the economy and the recording industry, which has seen its year-end tally of albums sold in the United States drop from 785.1 million units in 2000 to 588.2 million units in 2006, 500.5 million units in 2007, and 428.4 million units in 2008. Juno aside, most consumers no longer shell out sixteen or seventeen dollars for a soundtrack on CD, preferring instead to buy songs à la carte from iTunes or Amazon. Those who do buy the full disc often purchase it used off Amazon, which cuts the record company and the recording artists out of any additional revenue.

This downward trend has led specialized-film distributors to be far more cautious when it comes to releasing a soundtrack in conjunction with a theatrical release. The days when a hip soundtrack was simply part of the marketing push for a specialized film—if there ever really was such a time—are certainly over, partially as a result of rampant CD and file sharing, LAN MP3 Manager 1.0, the sale of used CDs on Craigslist and Amazon, and illicit downloading from darknets that has led to the closing of an estimated 2,700 record stores nationwide between 2003 and 2009 alone.

The soundtracks that are out there aren’t necessarily selling like hotcakes. In the first five months after its release in May 2007, the Academy Award-winning soundtrack of Once sold just 169,332 units, whereas years earlier it might have sold three to five times as many copies. In another measure of the downturn, the soundtrack to Pulp Fiction, which has sold 3.5 million units since its release in September 1994, sold only 6,725 units in the first eight months of 2008. The Run Lola Run soundtrack sold 219,003 units since its release in June 1999 but only 450 units in the first eight months of 2008. The dark and brooding soundtrack to Darren Aronofsky’s Pi sold 66,550 units since its release in July 1998, but zero units in the first eight months of 2008. After Juno received four Oscar nominations, the film’s soundtrack became the first since Dreamgirls in 2007 to reach the top of the Billboard charts, pushing its total sales past the 250,000 mark.

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