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HMV Canada Cuts Music CD Prices
umStefa notes a CBC story reporting that the largest music retailer in Canada, HMV, has slashed prices on CDs and is attributing the move to demand by customers for lower prices. The back catalog of popular artists will see price cuts of up to 33%; the cuts average 20% across the board. The Canadian version of the RIAA is spinning the news as being a direct result of music piracy.
Let's here it for music piracy, the only thing that's putting some competition into the market.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Somewhere in Bentonville, Arkansas, a Wal-Mart executive is deciding how to respond to this pricing move. When the decision is made, calls will go out to record companies, telling them what Wal-Mart is willing to pay. That's what really scares the RIAA.
The action to reduce the price of CDs actually brings the cost more in-line with what the true cost should be. For many years RIAA included marketing of a group was factored into the cost of the CD/Tape/Album.
Well, I call shenanigans on that. When is the last time you saw any marketing for any of the older groups? The only time they do anything is to pump up sales of re-masters or collections.
If they lowered the price to USD$8-10 a CD, I'd consider buying some of my old favorite groups. But for now, I have my XM and a steady supply of music that's free of bullshit-interruptions and asshat DJs. Spend USD$18 for a CD? No way, not even for a group I truly enjoy. That's pure and utter BS.
compound the problem with the fact that most of the albums are "Created" bands.. American Idol winners or some other such flavor of reality-music based on casting and music piped through filters to analyze it for "hit-ness" .. ..
yet.. people still gobble up the slop
perhaps them wanting lower prices is the final end-result of the music industry trying to kill artist creativity and control the albums from initial casting to shelf.
And indy music is starting to gain serious traction.. I wonder why.
The music we are talking about here is the walmart mass-produced version of music that 98% of polled citizens will not find offensive..
It should be cheap.
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
Can someone confirm (or deny) that Britain has been able to stem the tide of illegal downloading by updating laws and increasing enforcement. From the experience of my peer group the current legal position in the UK is of little relevance. There certainly don't seem to be as many court cases as in the US.
Or am I just living in cloud cuckoo land and the police are about to kick my door down and confiscate my PC and MP3 player.
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
Pitchfork Media might be of use as well, a music review website that covers alot of indie CDs. I trust it somewhat less than I do Jeph, but it can at least expose you to music(good or bad). Their reviews can be
It's a grassroots sort of marketing style for sure. One has to actually go out and LOOK for the material in order to learn about it. But the resources are out there, if you are willing to put a very mild amount of time into it. Gwen Stephanie? I wouldn't cross the street to get her entire discography for free. Not even if it was in FLAC or high quality ogg vorbis files!(gasp)
Personally, I've been happier reading QC and hearing about Broken Social Scene or The Postal Service or Battles or The Fiery Furnaces or or or... Well, you get the idea. I'd never heard of these bands until I started reading QC, and now the "Indie" folder on my computer has works from many dozens of artists.
If you want some music suggestions send me a msg, I'll fire off the names of some favoured bands that you can check out. >=}
This article from the Globe and Mail provides some more interesting insight into why they are doing this.
However it raises more questions. Like if younger people are buying more old Pink Floyd albums (errr... CDs), why is HMV charging $10 dollars more than newer CDs? After 30 years on the market you would think that 'Dark Side of the Moon' or the 'Led Zepplin' CDs had made their money and maybe could be reduced to the price of say, a CD produced in 2007?
And for those who don't know, HMV is the Canadian equivalent of, for example, the chain of Virgin record stores. In fact, HMV recently took over the Virgin location on the corner of Burrard and Robson in downtown Vancouver.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
See my post above - I don't think I've heard of a single case like the USA has. They may have cracked down on some of the people who sell pirated disks at markets, car boot sales and similar, but they've not done anything that I know of against the lower-level piracy of MP3s from P2P.
To hell with pirating.
If you're looking for actual, physical cd's at a lower price, look no further than online used cd stores such as this one. I keep a list of albums I've always wanted, and every few months I order a batch of about 10. I normally pay between $3 and $6 each, $7 at the most. The quality is normally good, sometimes even "new". I simply FLAC them into my archive and put the originals away for storage, giving away the jewel cases.
I've amassed a collection of some 300 albums, mostly thanks to this method. Of course, it works better for older rather than newer stuff -- if you're looking for the latest and greatest pop superstar platinum album, you're not going to find it for $6. Fortunately, I'm not into that anyway.
No, I'm not affiliated -- just a satisfied customer. One last thing: when you buy used, the RIAA doesn't get one cent.
This is the problem the recording industry has got: The 'n'th pressing of some old album onto a new media ought to be cheaper than the original, as they haven't had to re-do anything, other than maybe shrink the album cover to fit a CD. What is the cover of The White Album anyway [googles] Hmmmm. OK. Can anyone guess?
So they accuse us of pirateering, and we accuse them of profiteering! It's a racket and they know it is. The whole screaming and shouting about pirate downloads et al is just a smoke screen in the hope we don't realise they've been shafting us for years!
As has often been said, they need to wake up and smell the coffee! Cheaper CDs in the shops - say £5 a CD - would likely mean people buying 3 CDs. Pile 'em high and sell 'em cheap!
Or wander over to sellaband where you can help unsigned artists get into a top studio by pre-buying their next CD for $10 (10 US Dollars), and you get a (small) cut of sales, Ad revenue, and downloads. Might not amount to much, but if they're as good as you think they are, who knows!
Pop into my Sellaband Shop for some free downloads right now, or buy tracks for 50 US cents for DRM free quality mp3s.
Eclectic beats from Leeds, UK
handmadehands.co.uk
I'm another Canadian CD shopper that's pretty tight-fisted when the price gets much above $15.
I don't download music; I have ripped CDs I borrowed from the library, which by my reading of our copyright act is legal as church on Sunday - but the bulk of that was out-of-print Jazz albums you can't find in stores anyway.
The real piracy battleground is over the "most popular" pop music that sells a lot of units for a year or so, mostly to people under 30.
Part of the reason I started getting more interested in non-pop genres like Jazz, World, Reggae, electronic was that it was cheaper - even in stores like HMV. I can go in there and get one Avril Lavigne CD for $25 - or pick up Django Reinhart's Jazz, hits by Dean Martin, a Peter Tosh, and an "AfroBeat Collection" for a total of $30. All from the 2/$15 shelf two paces from Avril.
Sorry, Avril...
There's just a LOT of great music out there, and once you stop treating music as a status symbol that proves how up-to-the-minute you are, buying anything new & popular becomes an irrational decision. Wait a few years, and it'll not only be down to the 2/$30 shelf at least, the consensus will be in about how good the artist *really* was under the hype.
However, if HMV drops prices enough, I believe I'll find out what the heck Amy Winehouse is all about this year instead of 2010. One really should encourage moves like this.
Well growing up listening to the music of the 70's and 80's my musical taste tends to revolve around that period. Anythiny from Deep Purple,Zappa,U2 and Rush. In fact the last album I baught was Rush's snake and arrows. I'm also a musician and there is one thing that is very important to me when I buy an albun or listen to some new music. Can the performer actually do what they are doing?
Unfortunatly with the top 20 garbage that has been playing in the past 10 years it's all been over produced superficial artists who get promoted by the record leables because it;s their first album and they have a really bad contract. After the first or second album they get put asside and they bring in someone new to use and profit from.
The bands that keep making album after album and keep their fan base is rare these days, mostly flash in the pans.
So excuse me if I don't buy that new album from that faceless artist who the world will totally forget in 3 weeks.
I'll just wait for Peter Gabriel's new album.
The brilliant minds at the RIAA, apparently whether Canadian or USAian, apparently know only one note -- It MUST be Piracy! Somebody at the big record companies (eg, their employer) ought to send some of these poor boys to class in basic economics. Back when I was a kid, the competition for my fixed entertainment dollars was split between LPs, movies at the theater, bowling, and a few other distractions. LPs were basically the only product I could take home (well, tapes, etc).
Today, the average teenager's similarly limited funds are split between PC games, games for gaming consoles (my son owns a PS2, an XBox360, a WII, and a Nintendo DS), DVDs, movies at the theater, rental DVDs, legal downloads, etc. It's also not a big surprise that the kids brought up on all of those choices have increasingly become a part of Big Music's key demographic.
And yet, Big Music doesn't understand this kind of competition (apparently, some retailers actually do), and can't grasp the simple fact that kids like mine rarely buy music of any kind. That doesn't mean they're stealing it, either, but rather, they buy games and play the radio or the PC in the background. If they buy a song, they'll get the one or two "decent" songs on iTunes, not the whole CD. They have very little first-hand knowledge of the "concept album" as we knew it... it's all random-play on the iPod (Kira) or the Sansa (Sean).
So, not understanding this, and not even really wanting to embrace the fact their very way of existence is being called to question, the one answer from the industry is always "must be the Pirates". I guess that's what they can sell to the stockholders and pretend to be addressing. They don't begin to have any answers for the real problems in their business....
-Dave Haynie