Question Regarding Conns...

[street singer]

Everyone knows that the Connoissieur editions are limited, but does anyone know just how limited? Anyone have any numbers?

Also, do they press the same amount of all releases? Or do they press different amounts based on how many they think they can sell? If a certain releases sells out...do they ever repress additional copies of it?

The reason I'm asking this is because something caught my attention recently and I've been unable to find an explanation. Some of the Conns don't last but a couple of years...the latest examples of this being the George Braith and Don Wilkerson 'Complete Blue Note Sessions'. Why is this? Were these two releases so popular that they simply sold that quickly? I doubt this... Or, were there simply less of these two made to begin with?

Then there are other releases that hang around for years. Bobby Hutcherson's 'Components', for instance. This was released TEN YEARS ago in the first batch of Conns...and it's still readily available!

What's the deal?! Any ideas?

(As an aside to this - how reliable is True Blue in determining when these things are going OOP? Have there been any recent examples of releases going OOP without being mentioned in the Running Low/Last Chance section at True Blue?)

[couw]

Each conn comes in two batches of 2.500 copies. One for the US market and another for the Euro/Japan market. I can imagine that titles will be pulled before the 5000 mark is reached when not enough copies are moved. The two batch system means a title like Components is OOP here in Europe, whereas it isn't in the US. I don't know about the longtime availability of titles like Components and Schizophrenia. There may have been reprints I suspect.

[Adam]

Once upon a time, also, Tom at BN said that if a copy sells fewer than 500 copies in one year, they pull it. My guess is that Components, for whatever reason, still sells decently, and I could easily imagine that the Braith, for example, would sell 1000 copies & stop.