Well you've got to remember that I went to school for cinematography so I've always been interested in film. It just wasn't economical before digital media and video cameras. It's mainly my brothers Tom and Steve who do the filming. Tom actually did become a camera man and worked on shows like The Rockford Files and was a Director of Photography on some other stuff. We'll sometimes use as many as ten cameras on a shoot.
Of course there was an initial outlay for buying all the equipment, but we thought it was a market move that would work and make sense for what we'd been trying to do with all of our recordings, trying to capture the live sound. We've had some good success selling them, especially at gigs. For a lot of the bands we record, gig sales are really important because like we talked about earlier there just aren't the record stores there used to be that sell jazz and blues records and keep them in stock.
It used to be that there were chains you could put a record in all across the country, but now you're lucky if you can get into something like Wal-Mart. The one cross country chain left doesn't even pay its bills right now, and you don't want to be chasing after people to get your money, because it almost ends up costing you more than it's worth. You used to have a great store up in Toronto
Sam The Record Man - yeah he went out of business a little while ago.
Yeah I know, so there's not much in the way up there of cross country chains either.
Well there's HMV and another small one called Sunrise, but I'm not sure if Sunrise goes across the country.
Well that's the way it is down here with Towers gone out of business now. The other thing is there aren't even that many distributors anymore - maybe four or five really big ones that get you into stores. But a lot of our bands don't play outside of Chicago so who's going to be buying them in Peoria or some small town in the Mid West anyway? So gig sales become really important because of that - and the DVDs give us something else to sell. People have just been watching the band on stage so a DVD is an attractive offering because it's a chance to be able to take them home with you in a way you can't with a CD.
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