Sensible words, Anne (Tabster). It's often overlooked that it's often the record company that owns the rights to the recordings, not the artist. So W-C would probably have had no say in the reissue of the Topic recordings. They should, of course, get the royalties for the performance and any composer credits.

As GUEST,HW says, the question is, why aren't all CD reissues cheaper? (sorry to paraphrase your words HW)

Reissuing old stuff has much lower overhead costs so there's no reason why they couldn't be sold at around a fiver or so, with no effect on the artist. Of course if the artist sells the CDs at gigs for a tenner or £12, then they will reap the extra profit rather than a retailer. But I think most artists accept that selling CDs is just the icing on the cake to supplement the gig money. It could be that trying to get £13.99 for a CD is reducing sales, whereas a tenner might sell more. It's not exactly "pile 'em high and sell 'em cheap" but the same principle applies - reduce the price and sell more, so you make more profit on larger numbers of sales, rather than have them gathering dust because you may be (slightly) overpricing them. Yes, many people here would support an artist by buying their CDs (I often do, myself) at whatever price they are, but youyr average punter probably would opt for the best price.