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Ordering a school musical from
Pioneer Drama Service is a completely different—and hopefully far
better—experience than ordering a name show from one of those big New York
companies. This fact was brought home to us last week when a customer called in
total frustration after trying to acquire the rights at her school to perform
the latest popular school musical from Disney. Between the differences in price,
the timeline restrictions, and the overall way she was treated, this high school
drama teacher decided it was not worth working with that other play publishing
company.
This teacher’s first eye-opening
experience came with the price of the CD. Granted, at Pioneer Drama Service, we
have to charge a steep $65 for the CD set—one CD with vocals and one just
instrumental—to cover the pricy expense of the studio time to first create these
recordings. However, $65 sounded like a bargain compared to the $500 the other
publishing company wanted for the Disney show—and that was for a eight week
rental! In addition, this teacher had to sign a damage/loss waiver agreeing to
pay $2000 if the CD was damaged or lost during the rental period! At Pioneer
Drama Service, our $65 comes with a lifetime guarantee. We’ll replace the CD if
anything happens to it, even if the damage was caused by your own CD
player!
Royalties for this school musical
were also an issue. At Pioneer Drama Service, our royalties are fixed. This
means we publish the cost of the royalty in our catalog ($90 for the first
performance, $80 for each additional for a full length musical). Believing it is
far better to allow you to budget for your school musical from the onset, we
charge everyone the same price, whether you choose to charge an admission or
not, whether you have a house of 200 or 600, whether you’ll be less than half
capacity or standing room only. If you decide you need to add a dollar to your
planned admission cost, it’s not going to change your royalties at all.
Unfortunately, our poor customer did not fair so well with the New York company.
Her school theatre is relatively small, seating only 300, yet she’s never had
more than 150 people at a show. That didn’t matter to the publisher. They based
their fees on her 300 seat house and charged her $125 per
performance!
Pioneer Drama Service also differs
from the New York companies because we have you purchase your musical scripts,
rather than rent them. Going back to our unfortunate teacher, she was given an
eight-week timeframe in which she could retain the scripts and music, after
which she had to return them, unmarked and resellable. Our philosophy is
completely different. Who are we to determine our customers’ rehearsal
schedules?! We want you to decide for yourself how much time you’ll need. Is
this tied into a semester long class? No problem! Is this going to take the
better part of a year because it’s a club that only meets once a week? Again, no
problem! You own the play scripts and are in total control.
Not only do we want you to be in
control, we want your students to have ownership in their parts, which is why we
sell you the scripts rather than renting them. Students have their own script
that they can mark up, scribble blocking cues in, highlight… whatever they need
to prepare for their part. Teachers also love this because their budget isn’t
dependent on how a student treats his or her script. After all, we all know how
papers look after being in a student’s locker for a month! Best of all, you
don’t have to worry about having any erasing sessions and collecting the scripts
to return!
The final straw for our frustrated
customer was how she was treated. Face it, there’s nothing pleasant about
working with a company that could care less whether they have your business or
not. Perhaps it’s the luxury of representing the most produced school musical of
last year that you can value your properties more than your customers. At
Pioneer Drama Service, just the opposite is true—we value each and every one of
our customers. It doesn’t matter if you are from a very small high school, a
middle school, an elementary school or even a home school. We appreciate your
interest in our material and want to make sure your experience with Pioneer
Drama Service is a very positive one! |
