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Honestly, as much as this is a controversial take here and I enjoy the satisfying feeling of holding a CD in my hands. This is why I support digital downloads. We can get really good quality downloads with zero shipping costs. The manufacturing costs of getting the music to us would be lower too, I would imagine. We'd also get the music instantly and be able to transfer it to any platform we prefer. Digital downloads remove the financial barriers currently being imposed on international buyers.
The only downside is booklet notes/credits. If they gave us a digital booklet with every release (not difficult if they put some effort in!) then downloads would match and potentially exceed CD distributon.
Right. Just make digital booklets and notes. Again, I understand the affinity for the physical CD. But the fact of the matter is a majority of people on this planet no longer use CDs for their music. Digital is the future and I don't see a problem with that at all. It would solve a lot of issues. Do you know what else it would mostly solve? Things going out of print. Missing out on releases and wishing you had bought them but now have to buy them on the secondary market for over 100 dollars when they were originally 24 dollars. If LLL's Point Break by Mark Isham had still been available at a reasonable price on the main market I would have purchased it from them.
Not sure if I agree with the latter part. Take for instance the third Transformers score. That disappeared from the digital market as well at some point. So even if the speciality labels decided to go digital there's a change they are still only allowed to sell a certain amount of copies
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Honestly, as much as this is a controversial take here and I enjoy the satisfying feeling of holding a CD in my hands. This is why I support digital downloads. We can get really good quality downloads with zero shipping costs. The manufacturing costs of getting the music to us would be lower too, I would imagine. We'd also get the music instantly and be able to transfer it to any platform we prefer. Digital downloads remove the financial barriers currently being imposed on international buyers.
The only downside is booklet notes/credits. If they gave us a digital booklet with every release (not difficult if they put some effort in!) then downloads would match and potentially exceed CD distributon.
Right. Just make digital booklets and notes. Again, I understand the affinity for the physical CD. But the fact of the matter is a majority of people on this planet no longer use CDs for their music. Digital is the future and I don't see a problem with that at all. It would solve a lot of issues. Do you know what else it would mostly solve? Things going out of print. Missing out on releases and wishing you had bought them but now have to buy them on the secondary market for over 100 dollars when they were originally 24 dollars. If LLL's Point Break by Mark Isham had still been available at a reasonable price on the main market I would have purchased it from them.
Not sure if I agree with the latter part. Take for instance the third Transformers score. That disappeared from the digital market as well at some point. So even if the speciality labels decided to go digital there's a change they are still only allowed to sell a certain amount of copies
That is a good point. From the consumer's perspective though. It would solve the issue with international shipping costs.
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Digital downloads may solve one problem with physical shipping, especially across borders.
However, they raise a MUCH larger issue. Many/most digital downloads cannot be purchased across many/most of those same borders, so they render that benefit meaningless, sadly.
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Setting up a store in Brexit-UK was the stupidest idea anyway !
A UK store makes sense for UK costumers, and a EU store for EU costumers. Obviously, an "international" store in a Brexit-UK made no sense though. As I said, from the EU, the US store was ironically cheaper and less bureaucratic to order from than the "international" store.
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Yeah... or buy from Music box and when you get 15 CDs you basically pay just 1 EUR shipping per CD!
The thing is, I never buy more than 2 or 3 CDs when shopping online. There aren't that many CDs I'd be interested in buying. Of course I could wait until there's at least a dozen CDs available that I want to buy but it would take so long that I bet a couple of them would get out of print in the meantime.
Same here. I don't buy enough CDs these days to make that worthwhile - and it still doesn't get round being hammered with customs charges. Rather, such a large parcel might be more likely to be seized.
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I really don't know what this has to do with brexit, a warehouse in any part of Europe could have gone bankrupt, & I dunno, maybe most of their European orders came from the UK.
I don't know if the bankruptcy had to do with Brexit, but it could well be if the company was specialized in international shipping. It has to do with Brexit in that the Varèse International shop was set up "internationally", or at least to lower shipping and customs for customers from EU countries. That worked fine until Brexit came into full effect. Then, shipping and customs for customers from the EU easily quadrupled so it was not worthwhile anymore.
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Posted: |
Sep 16, 2022 - 3:00 AM
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By: |
Lokutus
(Member)
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I really don't know what this has to do with brexit, a warehouse in any part of Europe could have gone bankrupt, & I dunno, maybe most of their European orders came from the UK.
I don't know if the bankruptcy had to do with Brexit, but it could well be if the company was specialized in international shipping. It has to do with Brexit in that the Varèse International shop was set up "internationally", or at least to lower shipping and customs for customers from EU countries. That worked fine until Brexit came into full effect. Then, shipping and customs for customers from the EU easily quadrupled so it was not worthwhile anymore.
Exactly. Before brexit ordering from UK was fine. It arrived quickly and when UK was part of the EU, there was no bureaucracy bullshit involved. When that changed and I think they might have also increased their shipping costs considerably it made 0 sense to order from UK, when if it came to price of the CDs+shipping it was cheaper to actually get it from US, which led to lower price based on which these additional EU-nazi charges got added.
Since Brexit I just get vast majority of my stuff from MUSIC BOX, which carries all major labels, can hold stuff for you, you can also add titles to previously placed orders until they enter shipping process and after it actually ships, the packages always arrive in 24 hours (same with Quartet) and there is no need to bother and waste time with these bureaucracy bullshit.
Sure the prices are higher on some of the titles of the US based labels but if you actually compare prices of the CDs when ordered from US + MASSIVE shipping costs and 22% tax and additional fees to actually get anything, the difference is pretty much 0 or so minimal it is just not worth the trouble and sometimes long waiting. Also as I mentioned before especially with 2CDs from LLL or Varese, MBR counts 2CDs as single release so instead of shipping costs equal to 2 separate releases you can only pay 1 EUR shipping (or even less with bigger orders) for 2CDs, which also massively reduces the final price of the item.
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The company that Varese worked with (Awesome Merchandise) specialised in band merch. A lot of bands have been hit by Brexit in that it's far more cumbersome to tour Europe now than it used to be, and in particular they have to pay import fees when they take merch/equipment into the EU and back into the UK. So I imagine less bands are ordering less merch, which is gonna put a dent in their numbers.
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