Further Adventures in Music Sales

Happy St. Patrick's Day, everyone! (Note that I didn't say St. Patty's Day, because if you say that then you're probably retarded. No, really. Go get yourself checked.) A word of advice to my army of devoted readers (shut up; don't burst my bubble): green beer is shit, and no self-respecting human drinks it. Yes, that includes you.

"But Charlie," you might say, "your average bro drinks green beer on St. Patty's Paddy's Day like it's his job!" To which I would reply, "That's because bros have no self-respect, nor can they technically be qualified as human. Now run along; the adults are talking."

Thankfully, most of the people who read my blog drink actual beer for actual people and not that Natty Ice shit--unless you're under 21, in which case I'm sure that you have never consumed any alcohol ever in your short, miserable life. Because underage drinking is wrong and nobody does it. Right?

Yeah, probably. Moving on.

It's been a little while since my last post, because apparently having a full-time job and a fuckton of Rossini to learn means that you don't have free time ever. Color me shocked. So, to honor the larger of the two black holes which are sucking away my will to live free time, I present you with another episode of Adventures in Music Sales! I'd make it an ongoing series, but I'm leaving in May, so there's really not much of a point anymore.

Snark ahoy.

Anecdote the First: So this guy walks into the Choral and Organ Department a couple weeks back, wearing some sort of chef's hat/beret hybrid and looking generally like he could be the (slightly) younger brother of Mr. Jimmy "The Rent is Too Damn High" McMillan. This fine fellow has decided that he wants a book of English organ music by anonymous composers, and asks us if we can help him find it. This isn't the craziest request that we've ever gotten, so we go through the usual questions.

Does he know the title of this theoretical collection? No.
Does he know who compiled these pieces? No.
Does he know the publisher? Hell no.
Is he even sure that this is an actual book that exists anywhere outside of his imagination? Take a wild guess.

In fact, the only information he can give us about this dubious collection is that he can hum one of the tunes. OH WELL THEN THAT SOLVES EVERYTHING. We just so happen to have a special super-secret music search engine in our back room that will find any piece of music in the world as long as you can hum it! And by that, I mean "Get the fuck out of our store and don't come back until you've at least verified that this fabled collection exists."

Anecdote the Second: This lady comes in with two pieces of solo music (read: not from my department), and asks if we have them in stock. I check our files and tell her that we don't have any choral arrangements of those two in stock, but we can order them if she'd like us to. She asks if I'm sure that we don't have them, and I repeat that we don't have any choral arrangements of either piece in the store at this particular time. She proceeds to go out front to the sheet music department, where she finds a solo arrangement of one of the pieces, and returns with the music in hand, telling me that she found it after all and giving me an accusatory look that seemed to suggest I had misled her in some way.

BITCH THIS IS THE CHORAL MUSIC DEPARTMENT. When I tell you we don't have a piece in stock, I am pretty explicitly referring to CHORAL MUSIC. I don't see how this is hard to understand. I wasn't lying or disrespecting you, but you will feel my wrath if you keep acting like a jackass.

Anecdote the Third: This one isn't so much a specific anecdote as much as it is a gripe about my least favorite type of customer. A depressingly large number of the calls we get in the Choral and Organ Department go something like this:

Customer: Hi, I heard [piece of music X] on the radio/on this CD I just bought, and I'm wondering if you have it in an SATB arrangement.

Charlie's inner monologue: Son of a bitch.

Charlie: Okay. Do you know who the composer or arranger is?

Customer: Oh, I don't even know that it has been arranged for SATB. I just wanted to find out if it was available.

[Charlie seethes with silent fury.]

Customer: ...hello?

Charlie: I will destroy everything you have ever loved. With fire.

Customer: What?

Charlie: I said, "Please hold."

Okay, so, certain aspects of that sample conversation may have been exaggerated for comedic effect. But not by much.

The point is, a good choral customer does a bit of research first and actually verifies that [piece of music X] is actually in print--or at least was at one point in history (c.f. Anecdote the First)-- before trying to order it. These people, however, are not good customers. They're idiots, and for some reason they all want to order gospel music.

Gospel music is problematic for sheet music retailers, because everyone and their brother has released an album or six of gospel songs, most of which haven't been put into print form at all. The stuff that has been printed as sheet music tends to be overwhelmingly for solo voice and piano with guitar chords, which means fuck-all for me specifically. It is only the rare, extremely popular gospel song that gets arranged for choir.

So! If you're cruising down the highway with your radio tuned to the Gospel Hour on 97.9 STFU and you hear someone singing "Jesus! Jesus! Look What I Can Do! You're Not Lookiiiiiing" or "I Kissed the Christ (and I Liked It)", chances are those pieces aren't available for SATB and you shouldn't even bother asking.

Because if you do, I might just shank you in the face. Consider yourselves warned.