Music Chat: Those INSANE Prices for Classical Music on Amazon

Comments · 101

• CA

  @carlconnor5173 · 3 years ago

  How I miss the experience of flipping through LPs, then CDs at a record store.

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• ST

  @StuartMcFarlane · 3 years ago

  I don't know if it's happening in the classical music market but I read an article once about the extremely high prices for some "ordinary" items on Amazon. These were attributed to money laundering. So the items advertised for outrageous prices weren't actually for end consumers but for organized crime to launder their money through shell companies.

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• SA

  @samuelheddle · 3 years ago

  From what I've heard, the Amazon algorithm penalizes sellers for being out of stock, so what happens is they automatically set the prices to something nobody will pay so they never actually run out of stock for certain items.

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• AN

  @anaklasis · 3 years ago

  I have the feeling that they are just out of stock and those small sellers are gone forever (and replaced by inscrutable  warehouses). What's more, they have a new policy on delivery (those golden times when you could just jump from Amazon France to Amazon Germany in search of bargains, now you just can't do it). And to point at the most painful fact: big companies don't reissue normal products anymore. Just "monster boxes" deluxe gold limited edition etc. As a teenager, I managed to get a humble shelf thanks to Amazon with cycles: Beethoven's symphonies with this conductor, Brahms' symphonies with that one and so on. Now this is almost impossible to achieve.

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• TI

  @timyork6150 · 3 years ago

  I buy most of my music through Amazon. It is very rare that I pay more than €20 delivered for a CD and sometimes less than €5. Sometimes I regretfully decline to purchase something, e.g. Tournemire&apos;s Moscow, because of the prices but am then pleased to find some weeks later the item being offered at a reasonable price. I often wonder who, if anyone, pays some of those ridiculous prices. It&apos;s similar with some books.<br><br>I&apos;m trying to persuade my kids that, when the grim reaper calls, they might be able to extract some value from my collection but fear that they lack the knowledge and patience to seize any<br> opportunities.

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• MA

  @mancal5829 · 3 years ago

  The &quot;Hurwitz touch&quot; turns everything to gold. Well, music physical media at least.

• MO

  @ModusVivendiMedia · 3 years ago (edited)

  I released a CD for an artist that was, among other things, being distributed through CD Baby. CD Baby&apos;s physical distribution program made titles available on consignment through the US distributors Alliance Entertainment and Super D, but they were also supposed to create an Amazon listing and sell them directly there at the suggested price (taking $4 plus a percentage of each sale). <br><br>Well first they put the &quot;manufacturer&quot; as &quot;CD Baby&quot; instead of the actual manufacturer/record label. Second, it had no description or other useful information (no track listing or that it was a 2 CD album, for instance, and no mention of the name of the record label). Then they didn&apos;t actually make any copies available on Amazon at the MSRP, instead creating a listing for the title but letting others list actual copies for sale. Quickly a few copies ended up showing up at 1.5-2x the MSRP, but none at the MSRP directly from CD Baby. (Obviously those offers were by parties who had access to order from Alliance or Super D, but didn&apos;t actually have any copies on hand. The UK sellers were marking up the price by the most, obviously to account for getting it shipped internationally to them in the first place.) This prompted a prospective customer to leave a review lauding the recording but complaining about the ridiculous price and saying they wouldn&apos;t buy such an overpriced CD (obviously not noticing that this was not an official listing directly from the record label; had they looked at the artist&apos;s website, YouTube, Spotify, or elsewhere, they&apos;d see listings pointing to the label&apos;s direct sales). <br><br>Then CD Baby discontinued their physical distribution program, returning the CDs to the labels (or destroying them, if they label didn&apos;t opt to pay for shipping them back), so the new listings all disappeared.<br><br>Now, Amazon is offering a single USED copy from some seller, still for 50% above the MSRP.<br><br>I then added a listing through Amazon Seller Central as having hundreds of NEW copies being available direct from the actual label/manufacturer for the actual MSRP, but Amazon is hiding that listing and still showing the over-priced used copy as the default result, which is also winning the &quot;buy&quot; box. The manufacturer is still listed as CD Baby, despite numerous attempts to correct it by various means. Amazon did add the basic information about the CD that I added in the description, but it&apos;s unformatted and difficult to read. <br><br>Overall, Amazon CD listings are a total mess from my perspective. Their Seller Central web interface feels like it was last updated in 2008 or something, and not upgraded since. Most of the data entry fields make no sense (and have little or no explanation offered by Amazon as to what they are to be used for, particularly for music CDs). Listing it on Shopify and Bandcamp were both far, far easier and more satisfactory. (And using the Shopify Fulfillment Network was far easier than dealing with AWS. The only reason to do that instead of shipping myself is if I try to ship CDs myself, the cheapest USPS shipping charge for a single CD to anywhere outside of the US, even just to Canada, is $15. Usually the total international shipping+handling charge through SFN is significantly cheaper than that, and the orders get shipped out automatically without any intervention from me.) <br><br>Also, trying to get distribution through CD Baby was nothing but a disaster. One of the ideas was that Alliance is supposed to be a feeder into the online catalogs of Barnes &amp; Noble, Presto Music, and others, but it never showed up on any of them anyway. I should have just listed it myself on Amazon and not bothered with any distributors. (I tried, but Amazon made that really difficult, actually IMPOSSIBLE to list prior to the release date, and I finally gave up.)<br><br>I did have the option of going through several other existing labels, one of which did have access to Naxos for global distribution, but at a premium of $5000+ over what it would cost me to do myself. On the other hand, 99% of classical reviewers seem to be systematically ignoring my communications about the album, so probably hiring another established label or PR firm might have been the price of admission to industry coverage. (I know they happily cover much less interesting albums than this all the time. It&apos;s all very clubby, and seems to have little to do with the quality of the music - witness all the boring as sh** albums winning &quot;editor&apos;s choice&quot;, &quot;album of the month&quot; or &quot;album of the year&quot;. It seems clearly to do with albums being pushed by companies that habitually take out ads in those publications. Everyone got pissy about Fanfare asking for ads in exchange for large interviews and cover placement, but they were probably actually just pissed at Fanfare for revealing what all the ad-supported publications actually do in secret.)

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• ZD

  @zdl1965 · 3 years ago

  That&apos;s totally nuts. Nobody with any sense will pay that kind of prices, even for hard-to-find antique LPs, unless they know they can hawk it at higher prices later. A fool and his (it&apos;s always a his) money are soon parted.

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• PA

  @PaulReynoldsJr · 1 year ago

  Dave, if you happen to read this, I was a first year conservatory clarinet major in 2000 and was learning all of the orchestral rep at the same time as my instrument. Almost my entire music collection was made up of YOUR recommendations because Amazon was where I bought! That&apos;s how I got my Szell Tchaikovsky 5th symphony CD, which I think I must have listened to 3 times a week. You were doing the Lord&apos;s work back then, and I have a great collection because of you! Your recommendations are almost all of the things that imprinted on me.

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• GR

  @gregt2022 · 3 years ago

  Yes insane, I usually buy used from sellers I trust and that has worked out well.

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• TT

  @tterrace · 3 years ago

  Once the Hurwitz-inspired CD buying boom hit me in early 2020, I&apos;ve gotten just about everything I&apos;ve wanted in good-condition, reasonably-priced used copies by checking Discogs and eBay sellers along with Amazon.

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• MA

  @mangstadt1 · 3 years ago

  A few years ago I spent 36 euros on Bernstein&apos;s first Mahler cycle with the NY Philharmonic. It was at a physical store, either FNAC or El Corte Inglés, in Madrid. I love to pop in and just see what they have. Often I come away with an unexpected bargain, like the day I picked up the Theodore Kutchar box of works by Smetana, Dvorák, Nielsen, Shostakovich (3 diswcs apiece), plus a disc dedicated to Latin American composers, for less than 15 euros. I had never heard of him, but at that price I couldn&apos;t go wrong.<br>When I see the likes of Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos flashing their riches, I say to myself, Not going there. I have yet to cross over to the other side. I have yet to place an order with Amazon.

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