MRH: For the cues themselves, I imagine that in the case of the Valentino library, it must be a very massive one. How much did they end up amassing over, say, a twenty year period?

DS: Well, I don't know for sure because there were different phases of the library. It was originally called the Major Library, the Major-Valentino, and then Valentino.

Some of the stuff from the forties came from British libraries. Valentino acquired them, and it kind of became a licensing agent in America, which is why the music got into American films. At least in the beginning, they weren't recording these things for their own library; they were just licensing other libraries. Then they started doing some of their own recordings in the sixties and seventies and all that.

There are a lot of cues that apparently are no longer in the library, but people have the old 78s of them, and I know there's some music used in The Adventures of Superman (1952-1958) that came from the Valentino library but are not in the Valentino library as we know it today, even though there are thousands of cues in there. They've kind of been dropped out because people don't listen to that kind of music anymore, or the recording quality isn't up to the standards of fidelity that they needed in contemporary times. I've no idea how many cues have been in the Valentino library during its history. I know that there are a few thousand now.

MRH: One of my last questions is in regards to music libraries, and more specifically the orchestral jazz scores used in animated series like Spider-Man and Rocket Robin Hood in the late sixties. For someone who would want to release them, how difficult is in approaching a music library house with the desire to release the music?

DS: It depends entirely both on the library and the person you happen to be talking to, and whoever's in charge at the time in legal or licensing or whatever, because sometimes the library controls both the master rights (meaning the actual physical recording), and the publishing, that is the concept of the music (the melody or whatever).

Other times there are arrangements because music libraries have been bought up and sub-licensed by all sorts of other companies, and over time a lot of the rights for certain libraries have become kind of murky, where you don't really know who might own what, and can't find a contract for this.

You know, a lot of things were done with a handshake or not even a handshake or maybe a wave or a talk over the phone and you might not have a paper trail. If you don't have a paper trail and you have a good lawyer involved on the library end of things, he's not going to do a licensing arrangement for you if he's not good sure they own the music and they have the right to sub-license it to you. It all depends on exactly what the situation with that particular library is.

There are a lot of very reputable libraries out there, and there are also lots of definitely not reputable libraries out there, where maybe for 50 years they've been licensing music that they don't really own. It was licensed to them for maybe a 10 year period, and they just kept doing it and doing it, so sometimes you'll see similar library cues turning up in four different libraries and they're all claiming they own it, and you don't really know.

MRH: The Spider-Man series was released on DVD by Disney who apparently bought the licensing rights for the window between the first and third Spider-Man film released by Columbia, from 2002-2007, and now that the set is out of print, both the series and the music have once again disappeared.

DS: If Disney bought the rights for video distribution or airplay or anything like that, they don't own the rights to the music if it is owned by a music library; they will have maybe distribution rights in the sync format within the show.

It's kind of like The Blob music that has appeared in all sorts of pictures, but that doesn't mean the owners of those pictures have any rights to the music separate from that particular film they have a licensing agreement with... No music library is going to sell their rights to the music because they need to keep making money on their assets, so it's not like a one-time score; it's meant to be reused over and over and over again