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. 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! |
