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 !

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!

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!

Happy New Year’s Eve! We have completed our listings and will go live with the next CD sale on Tuesday, January 6, at 10AM Pacific (1PM Eastern) at www.fsmcds.com . This is a very interesting collection with a lot of rare but inexpensive items I had never seen before, as well as the usual collector goodies. There is also a significant assortment of library music CDs, and I didn’t know how many name composers contributed to these. Looking forward!

I’ve gotten permission from another batch of sellers to do clearance prices on more of the oldest stock at www.fsmcds.com . If you go to the end of the listings (presently page 45 ) and work backwards, you’ll see the slashed-out prices with the sale prices beside them. Some are pretty radical so I hope you find some good deals! One way or another, I need this stuff to move! If you want a spreadsheet of the entire inventory, please go here . We are prepping the next big sale—c

The great star and icon Brigitte Bardot has passed at the age of 91. Deadline news item here . In her honor, one of the all-time great film themes, Le Mepris ( Contempt ) by Georges Delerue: I know Marty Scorsese agrees with me!

The Star Wars main title is one of the most familiar pieces of music in the world. But I saw a dopey video that claimed it was not really in B-flat major (of course it is), but in E-flat major. It’s so wrong, I don’t even want to embed it, but it’s here . The reason is because of the A-flat major chord near the end of the main theme (dah-dah-dah DUN)—look at the top stave below: A-flat major is not a chord in the B-flat major scale. It’s been a long time since I wrote a musi

We’ve improved the home page at www.filmscoremonthly.com . We are working our way systematically through the site to fix things—stay tuned, and thanks for your patience!

Check out this reduction Patrick Suiter posted a couple of years ago of the Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban quidditch match by John Williams. I guess I missed it at the time? It would take me hours to go through it carefully. This movie is like the Empire Strikes Back of the Harry Potter movies—where all the choices work together to make the very best version of the franchise. It’s not even a matter of being “darker,” just in elevating everything into more mature

We are making progress getting the new site organized—but there’s a ton left to do. I am particularly concerned with the search engine(s). We have 35 years’ worth of content, and it’s a priority for me that people be able to find what they’re looking for. This is likely going to take thousands of dollars to program, but we will do it!

I stumbled on a YouTube video about one of my guilty pleasures, Logan’s Run . (Nothing guilty about loving the Goldsmith score, though!) Here’s a playlist to a series of videos meticulously trying to reconstruct the lost bits, using audio from a preview screening.

Intrada has announced their next Kickstarter will be to record a CD of The Night of the Hunter , an absolutely gorgeous score by Walter Schumann that’s buried under narration on the existing soundtrack album. Bravo! Can’t wait for this one!