BSS was one of the very first DVDA releases. It was at a time when Warner was actually trying to promote the format. It was included on the disc as a 'bonus track'.
Warner may have been trying to show that the new format had room for extras, to justify premium pricing. It was as if the record companies were trying to say, "We expect you to pay a premium for this, so we have added value to your purchase. You can now justify paying $30 for an album you could buy for $15 in an older format."
Remember that initially DVDA had some pretension as to being a multimedia format. There was often video tracks added. Many discs had photo arrays. Producers could add historical data about the artist or the making of the album. In fact, this has been seen as one of the reasons that the format failed. In trying to be all things to all producers, a menu system was required. This, in turn, required a video monitor. Many consumers saw DVDA as a music format and didn't want the extras, or the video requirement. Also, the menu system user interface rules were almost non-existent, resulting in confusion by users, and even errors by producers so egregious that some discs wouldn't play on certain hardware.
Warner may also have used the 'bonus track' as a tease... "If you buy this title, we may release this other title."
Steven.
Hi Steven.
I know how DVD-A/V works, as I make the things. I've seen those arguments before and am not really impressed by them at all. It's a simple enough matter to make the disc autoplay if the label or the artist want it to, with the menu system only happening after playback of the main album or on pressing Top Menu.
I'm also not convinced by the claims it "failed" because of putting too much on the discs - this is a strange claim. It asks me to believe people did not buy them because there was too much content on the discs for them to bother with? It's a classic case of you are damned if you do & damned if you do not - people
expect DVD to have visual content, and believe me it is far simpler to make a straight disc with a single stream that has no graphics at all - I can knock one of these up in about 30 minutes.
All discs we create default to the main menu with the PLAY button selected, so no screens are needed if you do not want them. Again, I can assure you that if discs had been set up with just the audio only, there would have been many, many more complaints along the lines of "why has this DVD got no video or visuals on it"?
The real reason it did not take off properly was the abysmal lack of anything remotely resembling promotion. I still remember back in 2004 when first trying to buy discs in London, back when we had record stores on Oxford Street like Tower Records, Virgin Megastore & HMV that we were looked at as if we had 2 heads when asking what DVD-A they carried.
Virgin (or was it HMV - it was 8 years ago now & I cannot remember too clearly) told us the following
Store Manager said:
yes, we do have some but they are upstairs in the stock room as they do not fit in the CD racks or the DVD racks so we do not know where to put them. Also, we have absolutely nothing in the way of promotional material or information about them, so they will be sent back
It was 2 things that caused problems.
1 - the abysmal lack of anything even remotely resembling promotion from the labels. Nobody will buy anything if it is either not on the shelves, or there is no awareness of the form.
2 - Lawyers raised legal issues about the royalties, the claim running along the lines of "this has 3 streams, so that is 3 lots of royalties" which is utter bollocks.
Artist royaltis are not by the mix, but by the record sales - per unit. Yet a lot of labels ran scared over getting tied up in expensive legal action, and promptly bailed.
It's apparently why Sony shut down their SACD department and let everyone go, and why they stopped doing hybrids.
Summary.
1 - All claims of DVD-A/V failure being due to having too much content on them is pure BS and excuses from labels. If this were true, why did SACD not sell? No video there - it's not in the specs at all, and this has likewise been claimed as a reason it did not do well. They cannot have it both ways.
2 - All lawyers should be taken out and shot.
Sorry, but this nonsense really gets to me. I suspect personally that what happened was ridiculous estimates were made as to what sales should be, and when they fell short of this the "logic", if you can call it that, went something like this (and I could name a label whose accountants used this argument to get them shut down too)
"We predicted sales of £500,000 on this title, and in reality it only did £100,000 worth of business so we lost £400,000". This happens because of the stupid way modern accounting gets done with revenue estimates being taken as what to expect, so anything less is a loss. Madness.
Another label I could name said "although we are making a profit on these titles, we are not making sufficient profit to justify carrying inventory" - in short, we wanted more so screw it.
What they should have realised - and
would have realised if they bothered to do their homework, is that surround & high resolution are niche formats, yet the people who do buy them all tend to be those who can afford to indugle in their hobby. It's a niche market, and should have been handled as such. The problem is that the labels these days are generally run by people with no understanding of or love for music, and run on the greengrocer model rather than the venture capital model. The greengrocer model says we need to make x percentage profit on everything and those that do not do this will not be sold. A label is a venture capital model though, where 90% never did recoup initial costs - this has always been the case - but the 10% that did subsidized the rest of it & also left a healthy surplus.
The current models mean that very little will ever be done now, as artist support is largely a thing of the past. This is very unhealthy, as most labels are nowadays living on reissuing back catalogue again & again after subjecting them to digital remastering of the most offensive kind and slamming the hell out of tracks in the name of "louder, louder, louder". They are, frankly, clueless. But to blame it all on the end users not wanting bonus content is pure bollocks, as if it really were that simple it would be so much easier - and cheaper - to produce.
Oh - and "Lucky Man" should never have been on BSS as it is not from that album. It's like including "Ashes To Ashes" on an edition of Ziggy Stardust.