The Best of FSM books have arrived! So we’re now good to go to ship out all the Kickstarter perks. We have around 700 to send, and can do 50–70 a day, so this will probably take two to three weeks. Many thanks to Paul Shipper for that beautiful cover art!

I had such a good time last night at the Scott Dunn Orchestra’s 1970s film music concert in Beverly Hills! Great renditions of classics like Chinatown , Superman and Jaws , but also a lot of rarely played pieces: Time After Time by Miklós Rózsa (with filmmaker Nick Meyer in the audience), The Taking of Pelham One Two Three and The Conversation by David Shire—and the encore was David’s “Manhattan Skyline” from Saturday Night Fever . I’m sure you can find a proper report/rev

Tonight is the next concert by the Scott Dunn Orchestra in Beverly Hills (Sat. 1/17/26). I really enjoyed the last concert and this one is all 1970s repertoire. Buy your ticket and hope to see you there !

FSM Online subscribers, check FSMO today where we’ve added to the main issue page a “Gallery View” to help you decide what to read. This will be on the issues going forward. The “magazine cover” interface is still there, on top, but now you have this as well.

Boy, this is taking forever. We will start to ship out the Kickstarter perks as soon as the platform finishes its mandatory 48-period to allow everybody to double-check (or update) their address. Stay tuned, it’s happening!

I was very sad to see this fundraiser for Jeanne Jones on Facebook . I have known her forever, way back to the earliest days of Film Score Monthly—always so supportive and kind, and a true and loyal fan of the art form. She used to place ads in the magazine for her buying and trading. I saw her only a couple of months ago at the Fans of Film Music gathering. Please help if you can.

Okay folks, it’s happening! I have closed the Kickstarter pledge manager (it’s still open another day) to collect addresses and postage. We are expecting the Best of FSM books any day now, so we’ll start Thursday with the non-book shipments (Ray Ellis CD, collector cards, mugs) and then add the books...and this will take up the rest of the month for us! (Typically we can get 50–70 packages done a day, and there are around 700, so that’s 10–15 days, or two to three weeks’ wor

UPDATE: It sold! Sometimes I walk past our inventory, which is still in our living room (another story, oy!) and see something and I’m like, we still have that? I produced the 3CD set of The Twilight Zone , the 1985 revival, for Intrada, and I really enjoyed working on it. Terrific scores by Basil Poledouris, Craig Safan, Christopher Young and many other notable names—and they all sound really good, too, we had the first-generation stereo mix tapes. There are zero copies on e

Intrada has launched their Kickstarter to record the magnificent score for The Night of the Hunter , which I wrote about when they announced it . This is such an important score and I can’t wait to hear it— provided they make their goal, please help !

This won’t interest my film score peeps but it’s NFL playoff season and I discovered a podcast by Julian Edelman, former Patriots receiver, that I’m finding super fun and entertaining—“ Games With Names .” He has great guests from the Pats’ dynasty years and good stories.

Here’s one of my favorite John Williams cues (and that’s saying a lot), “Hide and Seek” from A.I. Artificial Intelligence . I keep wondering when companies are going to crack down on all these score videos. This guy has a downloadable pdf behind a paywall on his Patreon, which seems like poking the bear. Great job on the video, though!

Because of the ongoing work to the FSM site, I’ve been more involved with FSM Online than I have in years. The January issue just dropped and I especially enjoyed the Vince Guaraldi piece . We will soon be installing the free months for our Kickstarter donors and I’m so excited to have them check it out and let us know what they think! We need subscriptions ! We will be doing a lot of outreach these next few weeks—as well as making more improvements so the online mag is more

Thanks to everybody who bought from the new sale at FSMCDs.com yesterday, we had a big day! So naturally today, and the rest of this week, is for mailing. Here is a spreadsheet of the inventory as of this morning on Google . Thank you!

We are live with the first big sale of 2026 : 2,500+ new listings, from hot collector titles to obscure bargains to a wide array of library music—most of which I had never seen before! The film “clapper” packaging in the pic above is a big set from Media Ventures featuring a lot of their in-house composers circa the early 2000s: Zimmer, Powell, Rona, et al. There are other library music albums featuring familiar composers like Richard Harvey, Frederic Talgorn and John Cacavas

We are prepping for the big film music CD sale (2,500+ new items, plus the 4,300+ already in inventory) at www.fsmcds.com . I am setting up portable tables in another room of the house to handle it. I hope the CDs sell fast because we need the room back asap! The new list will go live Tuesday, 1/6/26, at 10AM Pacific / 1PM Eastern. There’s a lot of cool stuff in there that I had never seen before, including multiple library music collections. See you then. Thanks!

I saw a YouTube video (natch) about what happened to Vimeo. It was pretty big 10–15 years ago but I barely use it anymore—and I’m not the only one: A shame!

Check out this very well done video of the top ten funk-jazz scores, per Chanan Hanspal on YouTube: Some of these I’m not very familiar with, I will have to check them out! I love this stuff.

I watched a YouTube video about the synthesizers used in Brad Fiedel’s Terminator 2 score: It’s possible I’ve already mentioned this in a blog column or online somewhere...but check out 5:40 where the creator plays a sound called “Brass Falloff” on the Fairlight synthesizer. In a normal register, it’s a brass hit. In a low register...it’s the T-1000 theme. You just literally press a low note and it’s that unforgettable pulse. Pretty cool—and way simpler than you might think.

Happy new year everybody! We’re looking forward to an exciting year at FSM, and it’s going to be jam-packed January as we ship our Kickstarter perks and make more improvements to the new website . Thank you!