Bruce Kimmel is one of the good guys. He was the first person to talk Varese Sarabande into releasing a soundtrack album, which forever changed the course of that company's destiny, and, by extension, this entire hobby. His earlier label Bay Cities was instrumental in getting a lot of music out there by David Shire, Jerry Fielding and others, and the label tanked because, as Nicholai pointed out, producing those albums at the time was so prohibitive. And let us not forget that it was his diligence and care that allowed us to have a pristine, legal CD of the original soundtrack recording of Islands in the Stream, among many, many other things!
His current label, Kritzerland is a smaller label often dealing with fringes of what is already a niche market, which is why their print runs are often so low. I enjoy a lot of Kritzerland releases because if they're premiere releases, they're off-the-beaten track stuff that I'm discovering, and if they're reissues they invariably sound much superior. Many of them are clearly labors of love. Promises, Promises is not my thing, but Bruce put a lot of work into the remastered version of this album. Yes, he is trying to turn a profit, but to say that he's just in it for the money is a horrible misrepresentation of what this project meant to him. I don't think that it is too much of a stretch to take what he says at face value given his track record.
As for the price, $19.99 is their regular price point for a single disc. You can argue that's a bit much for a CD, but again, they're a boutique label.
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