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Domain: fopp.co.uk
Stories and comments across the archive that link to fopp.co.uk.
Comments · 10
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You want $35 CDs.... we had themActually, I would really enjoy seeing the RIAA's member companies decide to all price their CDs at $35 a piece. Yeah, just try that, guys. Consider this; before Amazon and friends, and online music sharing took off, the main outlets for music in the UK were the Virgin Megastores and HMV.
Back then, Virgin used to carry a good selection of CDs. However, for some reason they charged *more* for back-catalogue CDs than those in the charts. Mid-price ones were £8-10 or so, full price single CDs were £13-15, slowly creeping up over time. And circa (IIRC) 2000/01, the typical price for many full-price CDs trickled past the £15 limit (i.e. £16+). Taking inflation into account, in today's money that's £18+ (at the *very* least) or US $36. WE HAD THE $35 CD!!!!!.
Virgin sell *some* stuff cheaper now, and you can bet your life that if it weren't for competition from Amazon and filesharing, they wouldn't have done that. They're still a ripoff for many things, and I still wouldn't waste my time checking their back-catalogue if it's not in a Sale. Fopp have tonnes of back-catalogue stuff for £5-7 (unlike HMV, they sell it cheaper than the chart CDs) and Amazon have a *much* wider selection and better prices than Virgin.
F*** those outstandingly mediocre stores; since they gave over much of their space to DVDs, they don't even have that great a selection outside the chart stuff. Urgh. -
Re:Oh well...I'm always curious though... DVD never really took off (it was popular, but not in-every-living-room popular) until CSS was cracked and people could copy their own DVDs (or rather buy copied DVD movies for $5 from the kid down the hall.) That was the real death knell for VHS. I can only add to what others have said about the implausibility of this. I got my first DVD player (or rather, a drive for my PC) in 2002. The format was already well-established by then and there were many DVDs available at pretty decent prices (I got my first couple of DVDs from a Fopp retail store for £7).
Yet writable DVD drives were still in the £300-£400 range at that time.
And while we're on the subject, I used to subscribe to a Netflix-style service. I'd intended copying the discs, and whilst I was able to do this, it wasn't worth the hassle; averaging out the rental cost, plus the price of the disc, plus the time taken to rip and compress the DVD onto a single layer disc..... I realised that I could buy the complete box set at a decent price and said "sod it...."
The size of the discs probably made it possible to sell complete season/series box-sets widely. This never happened on VHS; although the tapes were bulkier, they also seemed to want to milk the buyer with 1h-2h content on a tape, when they could have fitted more. Possible result? Too expensive, too bulky; so how often did anyone buy complete runs? Not often.
I guess with DVD someone twigged that countless people buying the complete series at a third of the price equated to far more profit than four nerds who shelled out for a couple of seasons of ST:TNG at two episodes per tape... -
Pricing
From the linked BBC article:
"Because it is a professionally put together site it does look legitimate, although it should be obvious from the price that it isn't," Mr Phillips said.
Oh really? Let's see... if I want to download an album in a 'lossless' format, which gives me an exact copy of what's on the CD without losing quality, I have to pay about £5. The UK high street chain Fopp sells most albums on CD for £5 - and you get the physical media and booklet with that.
I presume Mr. Phillips is using the form of 'legitimate' whose inverse means 'illegal'. Is Fopp 'obviously' illegal too? Should we call them and ask how they feel about Mr. Phillips implying that they are running an illegal operation due to the prices of their CDs?
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Re:Will affect legitimate consumers
Yep. There was a time I could buy a CD, listen to it once, realize I really didn't like it, and return it.
You still can, at Fopp (flash-only site!), in the UK.
Rik
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Sell the CD cheap, and who wants to rip vinyl?
But on a more serious note I wholeheartedly agree. The only reason I would rebuy stuff on CD when I've already got the vinyl is because most of my vinyl is knackered (or should I say well used
You forgot the other reason; because you can buy it on CD at a price that's far less than your time taken to transfer the thing is realistically worth.
I find it very hard to get good transfers from vinyl to CD/MP3. Of course, I am using a cheap (and old) 'Midi' HiFi (an oxymoron, but I digress), and doing it for one-offs, but...
If I can buy the CD for UKP 10.00, it is probably not worth my time transferring, bearing in mind the mediocre-quality end results.
Of course, if you have a good audio system, very good quality vinyl or cassette sources, and have enough material to make it worth your time setting it up very carefully and doing your collection on a 'production line' basis, then that would probably not be the case.
But it'd still be questionable whether it was worth it if you could get the album in question for 5.00 at your local Fopp store(note: Flash required, I don't use that...).
Singles are a different kettle of fish; it's often hard to get songs individually once out of the charts, and buying 20 mediocre CD albums to get 20 single tracks isn't much good. So, I would transfer them in that case.... *after* scouring the P2P networks for decent-quality rips. -
Re:5 cents a song
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Re:Price of legal downloads
Exactly - unless you want to buy chart crap, CDs are pretty cheap. Most of the stuff in Fopp is around 5-7 pounds per CD (Chilli peppers, Bowie, Tom Petty to name a few I've bought from there).
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Re:The thing that bothers me about that argument i
I'm not sure, but I think that's down to the shops. If it sits on the shelf for months on end, they need to charge more for it than things that they turn over quickly, because at the end of the day they can only keep so many CDs in stock, and that floor space costs money.
Of course, it's all wrong. Here in the UK there's a smallish chain of shops called Fopp whose USP is that they always have hundreds of great albums for five or seven pounds. So you go in and you buy half a dozen CDs you didn't know you wanted, and they're the very same CDs that are gathering dust in the Virgin Megastore up the road.
And the beauty of this is that it's self-perpetuating - you buy a CD just to see if it's any good, and because it's so cheap it's no big deal if it's not. You find you like it, you go back and buy that artist or label's entire back catalogue. Fopp's worse than a crack dealer, basically. -
Changed a bit...
The UK price seems about right for the time(*), for non-chart CDs... total ripoff (chart CDs were usually slightly cheaper).
*BUT* it does include sales tax (specifically, VAT at 17.5%). Nowadays, online and supermarket competition has forced down the price of chart CDs to under UKP 10.00, and nice shops like Fopp sell many CDs for UKP 5.00-7.00 (US$9-13). Major chains still try to stiff you on the non-chart stuff, but I'm not paying that.
(*) Assuming 1996 exchange rate was 1:1.5 and 2003 rate of 1:1.8 -
mmm...subscription models
I do buy CDs every month. In fact I usually buy several each week. Music is important to me, so I'm happy to spend £20-£30 per week on it. A subscription model would be a godsend to me, but only if they have the music I want. The kind of stuff I listen to seems to only be available in specialist stores. Much as I love spending a Sunday afternoon browsing through these stores, if I knew I could get all the releases I want for a monthly subscription, I'd be sorely tempted. I'd probably still buy the stuff I really like on CD too.