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!