AUGUST 2008 - HOW & WHY DISNEY IS ON ITUNES

Scott Wolf: How did your presence on iTunes come about, and are you able to release things on iTunes that you can't release in music stores?

Randy Thornton: Well, as I said previously, I started off as the clerk and part of my responsibility was the master tapes. Most of my records were Disney records so it was real kick to be in the room that housed all the masters for all the records that I had as a kid. The place was neat but it wasn't well organized by the time I got there so one of my original jobs was to go through and start organizing the tapes, finding out what was there and sequencing things. That's how I found the Annette stuff and the "Mary Poppins" demo and things.

When I would be working on stuff, I'd occasionally pull a master off and pop it on a tape machine and listen to it. It was just really great to have this. Then, years later when I did the "Jungle Book" soundtrack, last time I talked to you about people who had written in about the fact that the dialogue had been taken out and they didn't notice the music, but that was just a small percentage of some of the letters. A lot of them were very complimentary. One guy wrote in and said he loved the "Jungle Book" soundtrack, it sounded really great and it was great to have all the music and the demos and the interviews with the Sherman brothers and stuff, but originally he was looking for the "Jungle Book" storyteller album. A record he had as a kid, where it was the spoken word. He really enjoyed the soundtrack but he was kind of hoping he could find this "Jungle Book" soundtrack on CD, but none of the storytellers had ever been transferred to CD at that point.

He said, "I'm also having difficulty finding several other records that I had as a kid." He said, "I'd really like to share that part of my childhood with my son." And that just... well, I went out to the trailer where a lot of our copies were being kept at the time and we have multiple copies of just about everything that we've done so I pulled the two or three albums that he was looking for and I mailed them off to him.

I realized as soon as I dropped it in the mail that I can't be doing this forever. We were able to spare those copies but it's only a matter of time, it's a very finite resource.

A lot of soundtracks were being restored at the time and CDs were becoming a big boom and box sets were beginning to happen and things, but it was a real difficult sell to try and get some of these old children's records and the old rock records and some of Tutti's (Camarata) stuff out there. I never thought of it as anything other than discontinued records and I just really didn't think of it unti this gentleman said that he wanted to share it with his sons, and I thought, "You know, we have an incredible history." How can I get this stuff out there again?

So after the success of the classic soundtracks I started talking about trying to release some of our old records. The company started getting behind it and they could see it. But, I never took into consideration retailers and trying to get them into stores.

We were able to do five CDs, it was the beginning of the Archive series. This was in the later '90s. It was Ukelele Ike and the Hayley Mills album, a Burl Ives album, Rex Allen and Louis Prima. So that was sort of like our test. These weren't some of our absolute strongest titles but it was a good test because you had names like Louis Prima on there and Cliff Edwards and Hayley Mills.

To backtrack a little, before I started, the company had licensed some of Annette's albums to Rhino Records. Rhino bases their entire business on old catalog and rare recordings and things. So some of the Annette albums had been out already but I wanted Disney Records to do this. Rhino does a great job. I respect Rhino. I have several of their albums myself, but I thought it would be cool for Walt Disney Records to do it.

So we ended up doing the Archive Series, but we had a (heck) of a time trying to get it into the record stores. It was then I began to understand what the merchandisers have to go through. Each rack space, each spot for a CD is essentially real estate. With so many albums being released every year, they have to keep the contemporary stuff. How do you balance it out? The new pop album, or Ukelele Ike singing songs of the '20s. To me, I'd thing carry both of them, but I'm not running a record store and trying to keep in business. They want things to move. It's nice to have that variety but you just don't have that luxury of space. Big record stores might be able to carry it, but little tiny mom and pop stores, our regular clients that usually deal with our records, they would take a couple but it was not a big thing. We just couldn't really make it work. So that went away.

Then there was the Disneyland and Walt Disney World Forever CD burning kiosks were put in the parks (where Guests could create custom albums of Disney park sounds) and when that program ended, a couple years later Disneyland merchandisers wanted to do something with those machines. So they came to us. It was a couple years before Disneyland's 50th anniversary andWalt Disney Records 50th anniversary. They go, "Why don't we make all of our old records available?" You know, start cleaning them up, restoring them and putting them on these kiosks and call the kiosks the Wonderland Music Store, based on the original store that was at Disneyland when it opened where you bought these records.

I thought it was just kind of a really cool twist that years later at Disneyland's 50th anniversary you could go in to a virtual Wonderland Music Store and buy essentailly the same albums that were available at the Wonderland Music Store through the late '70s.

My only concern was that CD burning machines are a great evolutionary step, but they're cumbersome. We tried to make it as easy as possible where you just press a button and you get the album, but it takes time to burn and then the labels had to be printed, so it did take some time. When you're going to a theme park and you're paying an admission and you want to go on attractions, are you going to stand in line to get a CD that you had as a kid when you could be on the "Haunted Mansion"? It was just a really difficult thing. It did well, but it was still kind of cumbersome to the Guest.

If a lot of people came in then they would get jammed, that was one aspect of the store. There was a lot of things that we all tried to work out, but ultimately it just wasn't a right fit I don't think. But, it was an important step. We were able to get some of these albums out there, get a lot of them restored and was also able to show the interest to the general public.

We didn't do any advertising for the Wonderland Music Store. It was kind of word-of-mouth and if you went in to the store you saw the kiosks and they had some displays to draw your attention to them. It did quite well, but it was just too complicated to work, but I also knew that things like iTunes and other digital downloads were coming online and I felt that ultimately that was going to be the place where these rare recordings would have a place.

It also comes in to payments and artists and all that kind of stuff, too. When you're manufacturing things, all the fees and stuff are relatively based on the number of units you're initially manufacturing. Well, when it's a digital download service you're not manufacturing anything. You don't know how many are going to be done so it's all kind of a pay as you go kind of thing.

Not only that, when you're manufacturing CDs it actually costs a lot more to manufacture a small amount than it does a large amount, with high volume discounts. So there were a lot things going against running small numbers of CDs, and face it, the Disney fan base is a large fan base and people that grew up with Disney records is quite large, too, but compared to the rest of society it is a small slice of the pie, so it was always difficult to try and figure out how to get this stuff out and get it in the stores and things.

Having it digital, we don't have to worry about manufacturing enough to make it cost effective. We don't have to worry about whether retailers think it's cost effective enough to put it in their stores and take up the space and all of that.

Another thing we had over the years as well, even with some of our high profile soundtracks and things, people had a difficult time finding them in the record stores. Again, because most record merchandisers want the more contemporary hip stuff that's going on right now that they can sell a lot of units of. That's how the record business works.

Now, with the digital download service, when they're up on iTunes you essentially have a record store in your house.

At the moment we're dealing with iTunes and a couple other places. You can search for the album and see if it's available. If it's available you can buy it right there. It's a perfect scenario.