A few years ago, when post-Urban Cowboy doldrums shortened the lines of tourists at Nashville's Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, the affiliated -- but higher-brow -- Country Music Foundation and Library decided to diversify.
Instead of relying totally on hall of fame ticket sales to finance its preservational and promotional efforts on behalf of country music history, the foundation went into the record business.
Kyle Young, the foundation's deputy director, said that establishing Country Music Foundation Records was "a pretty logical move, really.
"We had helped the major record companies put together various historic packages -- getting cover art together for them, getting notes written and so on -- and through the hall of fame's gift shop, we already had a mail-order business through which we had been selling records put out by a lot of the smaller companies."
Barely two years old, CMF Records has put out two albums of previously unreleased music by Hank Williams, one by Jim Reeves and a just-issued one by the Louvin Brothers.
Young said that the first Williams recording, Just Me and My Guitar, has sold nearly 30,000 copies, while the second, The First Recordings, has sold between 20,000 and 25,000.
cember, has sold 5,000 copies.
The sales figures would be respectable for virtually any small record company. They are all the more so because more than half of CMF's sales are direct to consumers, meaning that not nearly so much of the $8.98 and $9.98 per-album prices have to be split with middlemen.
Even the Reeves album, with its 5,000 sales, is already a financial success.
"We press 5,000 albums at a time," Young said, "and our break-even point occurs well within that first 5,000 run. On the Reeves album, it was 3,300 or something like that.
"Our cost to do the Reeves album, meanwhile, was about $4.95 per unit, considerably more expensive than any other one we've done. The Louvin Brothers album was about a buck lower than that."
There would have been no foundation, and almost certainly no such LPs as the ones it issues, were it not for the success of the hall of fame, a Music Row landmark currently observing its 20th anniversary.
"Since opening its doors in April 1967, the facility has attracted more than 6.5 million visitors and has become the most successful hall of fame in existence," said director Bill Ivey. "Our budget in 1967 was around $150,000. The institution now operates on a $2.8 million annual budget."
The staff of the hall of fame and the foundation has grown from three original full-time employees to more than 70 full- and part-time workers. Several staff members are experts in specialized areas of country music research.
The existence of such a staff allowed Young to go into the record business -- the intent of which is to provide collectors and die-hard enthusiasts with obscure and previously unreleased music by performers who have exerted influence on more popular contemporary artists.
By finding and releasing radio transcriptions and/or other recorded alternate takes of songs by seminal country stars, the foundation assures its productions the interest of collectors -- and, thus, a certain sales level.
But if you assume that simply making records out of old transcriptions and the rest is a simple matter, assume again.
"When we got into the Reeves package, for example, like any other record label we had to deal with a fairly complicated royalty structure," Young said.
"I had to pay a certain percentage to the Opry people to use their name. I had to pay a percentage to Mary Reeves the singer's widow and the Reeves estate. I had to pay a royalty to Reeves' original label, RCA. Obviously I had to pay royalties to the publishers of the songs. We also had to upgrade the royalties paid to the musicians, from a radio scale to a recording-session scale. . . . "
The $8.98 price (plus postage and handling) on all CMF Records' releases except the Reeves album, which is $9.98, may seem high in comparison to the cut-rate deals often available on records released by major companies -- but it isn't.
In contrast to the 10-or-fewer songs on the major companies' records, CMF offers between 12 (on one of the Williams albums) to 20 cuts (on the other Williams package).
And, of course, $8.98 is not a lot to pay for a slice of country music history.