The ridiculous price of CDs

TTony

Mr Postie has just delivered this ...

13CDs.  £25.  

I'm hoping that Mr Claus is going to turn up with ELO's back catalogue - 11CDs for <£25.

And you can have any number of "Original Album Classics" collections, typically 5CDs in a little box for £15-ish.

I remember CDs first appearing, when they had to be priced at 12-£15 because of all the blah-blah-blah (insert excuse of choice from record company).  And even today, you're looking at £10 for most releases.

Am I a huge fan of the Byrds or ELO?  No, not really a *huge* fan of either, but I am a fan of music generally.  Those are (were) gaps in my music collection that I thought ought to be filled, and at those prices, there was really no reason not to buy them, listen to them, and extend my musical understanding / experience / whatever.

If CDs had always been priced like this, I'd have a lot more today!

JAYJO

I would recommend the 5 10,000 Maniacs albums off amazon for about £11. Bargain.

not_the_dj

TTony said:

And you can have any number of "Original Album Classics" collections, typically 5CDs in a little box for £15-ish.

I did a post on those collections a while back. I got the Van Halen, Gary Moore, Thin Lizzy, Dream Theatre and ZZ Top sets...all bargains when you look at it as a "price per disc" perspective.

I guess they're albums that have pretty tiny sales figures individually these days, so whack them all together in a little cheap box like that might actually mean they sell more.

Megii

There was a box set of all Joni Mitchellj's key albums I saw a while back - may have been £15 IIRC, crazy. And despite the advantages of mp3 etc., they don't sound anything like a CD through a decent hi fi system (I won't get into a comparison with vinyl at this point!). Nice buy!

ROOG

I have topped up on early Metal for xmas, I hope the neighbours like it too.

Edit that: the wife has told me that they will be confined to the car, humph!

TTony

Megii said:

There was a box set of all Joni Mitchellj's key albums I saw a while back - may have been £15 IIRC, crazy. And despite the advantages of mp3 etc., they don't sound anything like a CD through a decent hi fi system (I won't get into a comparison with vinyl at this point!). Nice buy!

Or just get a whole load of them  for £27

And you're right - CD on a decent player and - for me - through a decent set of headphones is a completely different listening experience than mp3 on a phone on the train!!  

mart

It's ok, somebody's doing something to counterbalance this: over £100 for a 6 CD box set:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/91uuJB6MwRL._SL1500_.jpg

ICBM

Seems the music shops have finally woken up about this as well - although not quite these prices, most non-chart albums in even HMV are now around the £6 mark, and there are very often better deals, I typically wait until I can get them at 2 for £10 or £2.99/£3.99

I buy a huge amount of CDs from charity shops for £1-£2 a go. Last week I picked up an album which still had its original HMV sticker from about ten years ago on… £13.99 :-O. Did people *really* pay that much? (I think I may have done once or twice…) It's really no wonder illegal downloading took off with such force and all the music shops went bust.

This week I bought thirteen albums and two DVDs for a grand total of £24.

JAYJO

About 3 years ago i paid £16 at HMV for a Vanesa Paradis album for the Mrs.Like all women she has expensive taste.
:x

Philly_Q

There's never been a better time to buy CDs, especially back-catalogue stuff - although I do get irritated with the neverending flow of re-issues, remasters and deluxe editions, but only because it puts me into OCD collector mode so I feel obliged to buy them.  Yet again.

My biggest problem now is space - I've got so many guitars, CDs, LPs, DVDs, Blu-rays, books, magazines.... there's nowhere else left to keep them.  So in a way it'll be a relief when the world eventually goes 100%-download and it becomes impossible to buy anything on physical media any more.

imalone

Dropped into this thread to argue that CDs aren't ridiculously priced, but I see you mean in the other direction...
That said I did pay about £13 each for two albums last week, though one was a 24 track soundtrack and the other a new release (Rough Trade instore event, so I kind of regard buying the album as the admission price).
Box sets have been good value for quite some time, I remember hoovering up Naxos discs a while back.

Rocker

@TTony, you said that CD through a decent player and headphones is way better than MP3. I agree 100%. Better still if you use a headphone (valve) amp rather than the headphone socket on the CD player.

strumjoughlamps

JAYJO said:

I would recommend the 5 10,000 Maniacs albums off amazon for about £11. Bargain.

I purchased to keep in the bedroom, already have them singularly, I remember paying £28 just for The Wishing Chair in the early 90s, no interweb then and was only available on import.

couple of other decent original album series are The Replacements, and Ride 5 album sets

TTony

ICBM said:

I buy a huge amount of CDs from charity shops for £1-£2 a go. Last week I picked up an album which still had its original HMV sticker from about ten years ago on… £13.99 :-O. Did people *really* pay that much? (I think I may have done once or twice…) It's really no wonder illegal downloading took off with such force and all the music shops went bust.

Oh yes, and I'll still have CDs in cases with similar HMV price stickers.  And "Our Price" (remember them?) too.  I spent a fortune on CDs back then.  

As you say, it was a prime reason for the emergence of all the illegal downloading, and I've little sympathy for the record companies who failed to see that they were destroying their own market, and then failed to react quickly enough when they realised that they had done.

mart said:

It's ok, somebody's doing something to counterbalance this: over £100 for a 6 CD box set:

That's something that really pisses me off.  You can buy Wings Over America (the original 2CDs, an 8 track live CD and a DVD of a TV show for >£120.  FFS.  Oh, it's got a couple of "collector edition" books included too.  I guess poor old Sir Paul needs every penny he can find.

The Clash re-boxed their stuff for £100 - sticking to their roots - and IIRC, Elvis Costello's record company released a box set for close to £200 that he tried to disassociate himself from.

There are plenty of rip-off versions out there too.

But I've just stuck a 5CD set of Manfred Mann & Paul Jones albums in my basket for £10.05.  

TTony

Rocker said:

@TTony, you said that CD through a decent player and headphones is way better than MP3. I agree 100%. Better still if you use a headphone (valve) amp rather than the headphone socket on the CD player.

@Rocker - probably true, but most of those cost more than my CD player originally cost way back ...

mart

TTony said:

That's something that really pisses me off.  You can buy Wings Over America (the original 2CDs, an 8 track live CD and a DVD of a TV show for >£120.  FFS.  Oh, it's got a couple of "collector edition" books included too.  I guess poor old Sir Paul needs every penny he can find.

....

I can understand it, in that the record companies know that the hardcore fans will pay any amount for something even vaguely special. But back in the day, some artists had principles and objected to their most precious fans being exploited that way. That way of thinking now seems to have been largely discarded as hippy dippy sentimentality. I'm not going to get on my high horse and say it's immoral, but I will say it seems sad.

Phil_aka_Pip

don't argue. One EllPee will rush you a minimum of £25

Megii

TTony said:

Megii said:

There was a box set of all Joni Mitchellj's key albums I saw a while back - may have been £15 IIRC, crazy. And despite the advantages of mp3 etc., they don't sound anything like a CD through a decent hi fi system (I won't get into a comparison with vinyl at this point!). Nice buy!

Or just get a whole load of them  for £27

And you're right - CD on a decent player and - for me - through a decent set of headphones is a completely different listening experience than mp3 on a phone on the train!!  

Actually I'm pretty sure that was the box set I was referring to @TTony - I may have been mistaken that the price was quite as low as £15. But £27 still totally ridiculous... In my humble opinion those exact albums represent the greatest sustained achievement by any artist of recent times, the absolute pinnacle of singer songwriters (sorry Bob Dylan), and she was on an untouchable artistic level during the 70s - just my opinion though.  

TTony

At the risk of turning this thread into a Joni Mitchell lovefest, The Circle Game is one of my favouritist tracks @Megii

ICBM

Phil_aka_Pip said:

don't argue. One EllPee will rush you a minimum of £25

This is partly why I don't quite understand the resurgence of vinyl. Sure, it sounds different in a way that a lot of people find pleasing - but for about ten times the cost, and in a format which wears out, picks up dust and crackles almost no matter how careful you are, usually suffers from those imperfections even when new, and is thus hard to buy second hand because the condition is usually questionable.

I know, this is a community of people who mostly don't see a problem spending ten times as much on a guitar as what a perfectly functional one will cost, but at least you're getting something that will often last longer and usually retain its value, as well as being fairly objectively better in the first place.

As Rocker said, if you want to get something of that old-school vinyl sound without the cost and hassle of vinyl, run your CDs through a valve amp or old-fashioned speakers - the things that make vinyl 'better' subjectively are actually because it's *less* hi-fi, not more .

Megii

TTony said:

At the risk of turning this thread into a Joni Mitchell lovefest, The Circle Game is one of my favouritist tracks @Megii

That's a good one - I'd have to go for one from The Hissing of Summer Lawns - which would be "The Boho Dance" in fact. Could go on and on about Ms Mitchell, fell head over heels in love with her music (and possibly her) from the first time I heard it, and still am.