MRH : MovieScore Media essentially debuted in January of 2006.

MC : That's right.

MRH : Did you anticipate that by November of 2006, you'd reach your thirteenth album release?

MC : Yes, I think so. It was my ambition to release quite a lot of stuff, because there are no costs involved other than my working time, which is substantial, of course, but I don't have to pay any advance bills for it.

I felt that if I'm going to try and at least make some profit out of it, I need to have a pretty ‘high speed' release schedule to build some volume (economically speaking). There is just so much music that deserves to be released. If I could just find the time to do it, I would release even more stuff – not on a weekly release schedule, as that would be insane – but there is so much good music out there.

There are so many fantastic younger and older composers which aren't very well known, and they really deserve this chance and introduction to the film music community. There's so much focus on big films with Hans Zimmer and John Debney and James Horner and all those guys who are terrific from time to time, but there's so much else to discover.

MRH : Particularly in Europe. I think European composers tend to be hugely underrepresented in North America, but perhaps even within Europe, too. You may have a Dutch composer whose music in only available in Holland, and unless there's someone in another part of Europe who's aware of that composer, you'll never get that music exported, and it'll just exist on a local level.

MC : Yes, that's true That's another good thing with online distribution: it's called the World Wide Web, you know, and it is basically world-wide. Now, iTunes has their store in selected countries, but with the new webshop that I'm introducing in a few weeks, you can live anywhere in the world and download the music. You can buy it from anywhere. If you live in Chile, for example, you don't have to rely on a Chilean distribution company to import that album; it's just much more simple.

MRH : In having your own roster of albums, I'm curious if you find that there's a certain risk by having albums available as MP3s in light of file sharing and the illegal downloading that goes on. File sharing has two sides: people use it to sample an album or a composer, and if they like what they hear, they'll buy the album; and on the other side, people just download tons of music – sometimes more than they could ever listen to in an entire year – just for the sake of having more titles in their collection. I guess one fear of traditional CD labels is that if their albums are available as downloads, then that music can potentially be available for free, which will further erode sales. I just wonder what your thoughts are on the risks, major and/or minor?

MC : It's a difficult issue, or course, and something that I have been discussing a lot with various people. I think that it's much more of a problem when it comes to popular music, with big names like Madonna and The Rolling Stones.

I'm not naïve, or course, but I think my stuff is so unusual for such a limited market that even the file sharers would find it too obscure to make available. I'm just kidding a bit, but these are the issues, and that's one of the things that's good and bad with iTunes: they have their own security encoding, which it works very well, until someone makes a CD and then makes an audio rip of that CD, and then that music can be file shared again.

The problem with distributing music online is that it's very difficult to actually have a working security encoding system. I don't think anyone has really succeeded in that area because there's always a way to work around it.

MRH : I know some labels have attempted alternatives. NAXOS over the years has built up a huge catalogue of classical and film music material, and they offer a monthly subscription service where you can stream any title from their catalogue, but there's no downloading allowed. There's Italy's GDM label, where you've got six month and one year term subscriptions and full access to the entire catalogue, and can download an album a maximum of two times. Admittedly, if you like the album and you want a higher quality version, you could buy the CD.

MC : I'm actually subscribing to the NAXOS service, and it's a great service, but the audio quality is not very good, so you can listen to everything, but you can't listen to it and enjoy it; it's very much a sampling thing. The NAXOS catalogue is huge, so it's very good for research.