My HMV browsing experience over the weekend was basically
Pull record up
Lean over to check sticker on back
Emit loud PFFFT sound so others - staff included - are aware of my displeasure
Repeat
Very noticeable upswing in the amount of back catalogue / legacy artist type stuff going for £39.99 now too. Thought I might treat myself to a copy of NFR! but they wanted £50 for that. The stuff in their perpetual 2-for-£40 sale has been stagnant for months too. Piss poor.
In the UK you can always find a “no purchase necessary” link on the website when a “pre-order for presale” offer is there, I don’t think they’re allowed to do it any other way (that’s likely what the asterisk in your screenshot refers to)
Do I have a story for you
Went in to HMV last night and was thinking of buying the new Depeche Mode CD…£17.99 for the standard edition! £23.99 for the ‘deluxe’ edition CD (same music but comes in hardback packaging) and £44.99 for the LP. I think i’ll wait a few months.
Can totally see Mode demographic being primarily CD buyers vs vinyl so this sort of pricing structure makes sense I think. Ridiculous obviously but probably fits with the buying habits of their fans.
Is there any reason why the the price of CDs and particularly vinyl is so varied these days? You can see a double LP go from anything between £25 to £50.
When I look at Blu-Rays and books they’re all in the same ball park. Is the market just trying to find the right price point?
For the Vinyl. I think a lot of it’s down to where it was made. A lot of the £50 seem to be imported in from the US. (plus greedy record labels. )
Just saw Modern Life is Rubbish for £42 lol
very on the nose
Was moaning to @JaguarPirate on WhatsApp about this yesterday but it’s so annoying how old albums just aren’t cheap anymore.
Without trying to get too much “old men yells at”, in the tail end of the CD heyday and you could go to Fopp and pick up stacks of stuff on Domino, Sub Pop, Drag City etc for a fiver each. Older albums were just cheaper. Because they were older.
But then recently I’ve seen vinyl reissues of:
Tbh they could quite easily sell me new copies of these if they were like… £15 or something. But no.
(Old man yells at structurally different music industry to that of his 20s)
That’s got to be a vinyl thing, right?
Mentioned this elsewhere… I wanted to get the new Lana Del Rey. LP is about £35 everywhere, plus postage. The CD from her website was a tenner with exclusive artwork. Her last album was £9 with exclusive artwork. Postage was £1.95. I got both for half the price of the LP of the new album, and didn’t have to worry about the quality of the pressing or washing my disc before playing it.
Increasingly thinking that vinyl is a bit of a mug’s game.
Depends, really. There are plenty of bargains to be had out there, you just may not end up with what you want.
My view is largely - does that really matter? Music isn’t hard to access these days, like it was even up to the late 00s. Owning stuff is fairly superfluous, it’s firmly now in the “nice things to have” category. If bands want to go “limited and gouge-y” rather than “cheap and available” they’re not getting my money, I’ll just listen on Spotify instead ta.
by 2009 it was laughably easy to get music just by google searching the name of an album and the word ‘zip’ or ‘rar’ but I don’t think the vast majority of people knew or cared
then again, torrents were incredibly popular innit
Wonder if torrents will make a comeback given the splintering of streaming platforms
RAR 360kbps thank you very much
Sure, and in 2005 I was in a livejournal group where people posted daily lists of hundreds of albums to download from Rapidshare. But then again
This is why I always laugh when streaming service price rises are met with a chorus of “you’ll drive people back to piracy”, because outside of a set of very online people who can be bothered with that, nobody could be bothered. Spotify got this. I would guess to an extent £30 vinyl records also get this.
I think my generation tho was very piracy heavy. At uni in 2009 i was laughed at because i had spent the last two or three years buying cheap second hand CDs online and from record stores just to rip to itunes instead of downloading them for free.
I loved doing that tho cos it was exciting when the post turned up with something new to listen to. Often based on forum recommendations or a youtube listen.
i also built up this cool collection that people could come raid and rip themselves. But i soon ended up just pirating almost everything as student budget kicked in and i got a good turntable/got into vinyl
/life story
I
This was my experience too. The idea of paying for music was widely considered outdated and absurd among my age group before streaming happened
What drove me mad was the housemate who refused to pirate but also refused to pay for music so would just take my CDs or get others to download stuff for him.
Got a mate who used to regularly pirate everything off of some dodgy site, albums, films, TV shows. Not sure if he still does it, but he never paid for any music or owned any CDs/dvds as far as I can remember. He was proper tight with money as well, never ever known him buy a round.
He did play Warhammer and collected chaos dwarves which was a huge money sink back then, so that’s probably why.