- Tue Jun 18, 2013 5:05 pm
#1364
The frustrating thing about Mondo is that they seem to really enjoy the economy of scarcity they've created around their limited edition poster releases. As far as the posters go, Mondo's explanation is that they only receive permission to produce very limited runs from the rights holders. However, I'm not sure if that applies at all to their vinyl releases; if they've got the rights to reissue an album I'd be surprised if they were being told, "No, you may only print X copies of this album", especially now that they're starting to distribute their music releases to record stores and distributors.
Assuming that Mondo isn't being given a limit on the number of copies they can press of their soundtrack releases, they appear to be encouraging the scarcity model by a combination of randomly inserted color variants and generally not announcing how many copies they're pressing of each release. (The only numbered edition I'm aware of was 1000 for the Record Store Day picture disc release of the Drive soundtrack.) Here's a comment on print runs from the Mondo blog:
"These are most definitely limited, although they are not numbered like our posters. We do not disclose the number to how many are pressed because we give some to our distributor for record store distribution. All of our vinyl are definitely limited edition, however, and once they sell out, we do not press any additional copies."
Considering that the edition numbers are readily available for all of their posters, this is disappointing. As for the random color selection, on the one hand it makes for a fun collectible but on the other hand, considering that their poster variants are for sale separately, it's a surprising that they don't do the same thing for folks who really want the colored edition.