About two years ago now I purchased the Duo-Art/Themodist 88-note
perforator constructed by Steve Cox in the UK, and have given some
thought to how best to use it.  (It's not ready yet, I'm still working
to get software and machine to a state that satisfies me!)

Received wisdom is that simply cutting rolls, putting them on the
shelf and waiting for buyers is guaranteed to give you a large stock
of unsold rolls.  The message is also that the fun can easily go out
of cutting rolls if you commit to more than you can deliver.  With
buyers fairly thinly spread and many of them not being particularly
clued-up to where things can be bought, you need a lot of sellers with
their own contacts list and enthusiasms.

There's little money in rolls so you can't afford to advertise to reach
every potential buyer.  When Steve Cox sold-up, he had some 600 rolls
on the shelf, despite having not cut any for two years or more by then,
and having in "Laguna Rolls" a well-established and well-known postal
sales business as well as welcoming browsers.  Yet when someone else
took on this 'dead' stock, half the stock sold within weeks without
discounting the price.  There's a definite lesson there.

Some 30 years back in the UK, another venture, that of Harry & Sylvia
Medcraft, ran into similar problems.  Apparently they got heartily
fed up with spooling, labelling and parcelling-up -- as well as with
ungrateful whining customers!  They simply gave up producing rolls.

Another approach for a perforator firm is to act as a wholesale
business, making rolls to order and selling them by perforator batch.
This greatly simplifies things: no stocks or tied-up capital, stuff
goes off the perforator into a box and out the door to a single buyer.
This approach also has the advantage that the rolls cut reflect many
different individuals' choice of titles, be they good or bad in other
folk's eyes, and they take the responsibility for shifting what they've
chosen to have cut.

A fair number of rolls are presently made this way, and lots of great
music is available as a result.  As well as the advertised stuff, there
are individuals who just sell rolls to their immediate contacts; I've
been lucky to encounter a few, so there must be many more.

The Rollscanners project has produced numerous extremely high-quality
roll scans.  Spencer Chase's e-rolls library has been discussed here,
and there are quite a number of other scanners working.  Many make
their scans available for cutting as new rolls: the scans produce
superb recuts, far better than traditional efforts even if perforated
as asynchronous copies (i.e. not matching the original perforation
patterns).

With sophisticated treatment to 'recreate the matrix', scans can
give proper binary replicas of the original roll.  A replica roll
on top-quality paper will last a long time: for instance, Oce sell
a photocopier paper with a 200-year archive guarantee (as well as 100-
and 50-year grades), and can itself be exactly replicated when it wears
out.

Roll producers can therefore (if they wish) set themselves up to
replicate any suitable scanned roll, allowing buyers to order anything
from the list.  That should satisfy the most demanding calls for roll
repertoire -- and no more having to locate a copy of a particular roll
before you can have it recut!  It's this aspect that makes Rollscanners
an immensely valuable exercise in roll conservation, no matter what you
may think of the electronic performance side of things.

Julian Dyer