Amy Grant CDs soon to be out of print in physical pressed CD form

Not really because of her contract with Sparrow which is owned by Universal which is notoriously difficult when it comes to licensing for 3rd party reissues.

 

Bummer.

 

The latest OOP Amy Grant remastered CD titles in physical form which will remain only available on Mardel.com CD-R and as downloads:
602537475902 Amy Grant 3CD Christmas Gift Pack AGG D2
094639679027 Amy Grant Age To Age AGG CD
094639678822 Amy Grant In Concert Live - Volume 1 AGG CD
094639678921 Amy Grant In Concert Live - Volume 2 AGG CD
602537471416 Amy Grant In Motion (The Remixes) AGG CD
5099969368325 Amy Grant Somewhere Down The Road AGG CD
094639679423 Amy Grant The Collection AGG CD
602537651764 Amy Grant
Time Again (Live From Bass Performance Hall, Ft. Worth,
TX/2006) AGG CD

The original issues are the ways to go anyway for sound and are cheap used.

 

With the big vinyl revival, perhaps her bigger titles will get reissued. And some of her later albums were never issued at all on vinyl. I've seen way more obscure stuff come out. There were a few of her cds available on the CD for sale forum here a few days ago. $4 ea. Do you know if she is working on new material?

 

She was recently doing an Alaskan Cruise show and they have announced the annual Christmas tour.

 

Buy the used originals like we do already.

 

Albums only stay in-print if they sell a minimum number of copies each calendar year. A licensing/distribution deal has no effect on whether an album will sell or stay in-print.

These titles that are being deleted are older albums from the late 70's/80's/90's that have simply stopped selling-or aren't selling the minimum quota required by Universal. It's possible that some of these title have been slow-selling for years-and Universal is just now getting around to doing a sales inventory on her entire catalog.

 

In fact, many used CD stores that sell CDs higher than $1-2 turn down her CDs whenever someone brings them in because of how common they are and people dump them in thrift stores and other stores that sell CDs for $1. If you have sold as much product as she has over the years, there will eventually be titles that are slow sellers.

 

Exactly right and this is why Mardel.com has lots of OOP Christian albums available as CD-R as classic Christian music does not sell very well for the major labels. The Christian fans on this forum and also the Jesus Music Facebook groups are the exceptions to the rule but the community is not large enough to sustain a major label.

 

Even back in the peak peroid for more pop, watered down Christian music where major labels were acquiring smaller Christian labels, 50,000 units was considered huge. Amy Grant and I'm sure Michael W. Smith were rare exceptions. That would be considered a major stiff by secular artists. Frontline Records, based in So Calif was doing well with a substantial roster in the 80's, and they couldn't even survive more than a few years. It was a pretty short run for that bump of sales, maybe 5 years, and then people gave up on all the artists like Amy Grant that were trying to keep their feet in both the Christian and secular market. Amy Grant, due to her great song writing and stellar production team, plus being a genuinely real and nice personality, was really the only one that figured out how to make it work and even there, only had three albums that sold really well. Which is about the average streak of any artist. And she was on the right label to properly promote her material. She was fortunate to enjoy a nice run before going secular, so combined with that had an extraordinary run. MWS only had a couple medium hits and aside from that, I don't recall anyone else really successfully doing that aside from a one off, like Butterfly Kisses, which wasn't an overtly Christian song. So yes, the sales numbers were pretty dismal then, and I'm sure almost insignificant now for even new releases.

 

Jrr, you have stated exactly why CCM was always a niche genre and why there is more a collector type of fan base for it than a mainstream fan base. People like you and me are fans of a lot of this music though and every time I post a thread related to CCM, I do not expect a huge majority of forum members, I expect the same core people responding. For every Amy Grant, Keith Green, Michael W. Smith, DeGarmo & Key, Larry Norman, Petra, etc. thread that get huge response on this thread, the majority do NOT get huge response.

 

I had a Christian music recording studio in the 80's and briefly entertained starting a label for the artists I was recording. Since I was in southern CA at the time it was the perfect place and I had the right contacts to get it off the ground. Looking back, thank goodness I didn't. It is very, very unlikely it would have ever sustained itself. Of course, I opened a record store instead. About as brilliant as starting a label as it turned out (but it was very fun and I didn't have a family yet so it was the right time to get something like that out of my system). Ask me how that went! Let's just say I made it about two years and about $125,000 later I called it a day! This was back in 1984.

 

Ha! That's nearly the entire list of artists that made any profit for the labels. Were very few. Sandi Patti, Bryan Duncan, Leslie (Sam) Phillips, and a few more as you know, but that was about it, and the bulk of the sales were in Southern CA. I heard numerous industry insiders say that once you left that area, few sales were enjoyed. So, for those of is that lived there, we thought it was this huge market!

 

Now everyone knows why I mostly mention the same few artists in CCM on this forum including Amy.

 

Some of the more well-known Gospel artists actually did very well. Evie Tornquist was one of the most successful Gospel artists during the 70's. At the peak of her career,her albums were selling around 500,000 copies(her Christmas album was certified Gold shortly after it's release). And,this was back when Word Records was a small,independent label.

Sandy Patty was even more successful.During the 80's & early 90's,she earned five Gold albums & three Platinum albums.

You also need to consider the fact that Amy Grant spent most of her career as a pop artist on a major label-hence,you can't really make an objective comparison between her and other artists that were strictly Gospel.

Incidentally- Aretha Franklin's Amazing Grace is the best-selling album of her career and one of the all-time best selling Gospel albums.

 

Well, I totally separate Gospel from CCM so I didn't mention it. I have no stats to back it up, but I know CCM was somewhat controversial for some, plus the music was so different I would assume most didn't listen to both. I'm not sure I agree with the Amy comment either, but there is certainly no right or wrong. Amy is doing Christian again, and there is a strong Christian track on Heart In Motion. She never said she was leaving the Christian market and in fact many of the A&M releases were still released to Christian book stores on Myrrh. You could make a very strong argument that the market left her because it for the most part did, though I think those fans, including me, still went to her concerts and she did perform her CCM hits. She is only doing Christian muaic again now, so I will make it easy and just say probably half her albums are for one market and half for the other. Sandi Patti did a good job pretty much appealing to both Gospel and the CCM market. Anyway, all that to say that was why I didn't include Sandi and others that were Gospel in my thoughts.

 

In fact, ALL of the A&M titles were released to Christian bookstores on Myrrh.

 

Surprised to hear that. Would be very curious to know how they did. I hope we will see House Of Love and some others reissued on vinyl soon.

 

"Behind The Eyes" on double vinyl mastered properly and with the half-dozen or so wonderful extra tracks added from the sessions.

 

They actually charted high on the CCM charts.

 

I didn't care for it when it was new, but I really warmed up to it and enjoy it now. Would definitely buy it.

 

It is a landmark album in her career from an artistic standpoint.

 

Isn't Simple Things on it? One of my favorites. Did those cds I send arrive yet? You can also pm me....

 

Simple Things is on Simple Things, an album I highly recommend not only to the loyal fan base, but also Heart In Motion era pop fans.