Does having access to endless new music do you any good?
I think David Bowie has some great Best Of compilations but the albums are pretty poor. These albums are considered to be classics while I think they're loaded down with dated filler.
Is it because I bought them three or four at a time and listened to them all within a few days? Those who love the albums probably paid full retail price and were unable to buy another album for a few weeks/months. So the album got endless spins until you learned to love the duff tracks. While I bought three or four albums (for £5) at the one time and listened to them all within a few days. I always had better, or newer albums to listen to so I never felt a need to play each album more than a few times.
Did the scarcity of new music directly influence the bands you grew to love? Were the records companies doing us a favour by charging £16.99 for an album?
As a separate question can someone give me an idea as to how much CDs cost during the early nineties as I struggle to imagine people paying £16.99 for a Bruce Springsteen CD, or £30.99 for a double album. Surely my memory of these prices are wrong? What's the most you've paid for a standard, easy to find CD? The most I ever paid was £12.99 for the single disc U2 nineties Best Of (and even then I overpaid by mistake as I thought it was £10.99).
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Maybe, maybe not...
I'm not for a minute hankering for the days when you'd pay that kind of money for a CD. but access to a greater quantity of music definitely impacts the amount of effort I put into getting "into" a new album. Back in the days when I was at school, I shuffled off the the local record shop with my £2.99 in my hand, that represented my disposable income for the month, and I'd make sure I got my money's worth out of that... it would be rare for me to give up on an album if I didn't like it after first listen - I'd make the effort, through repeated listens, to get into it.
These days I can pay £9 for 40 tracks (say, 3 albums) a month from EMusic, not to mention any other less, errrm, legitimate downloads that might find their way onto my ipod. Couple that with the fact that my free time for listening to new music has gone down significantly due to arrival of kids, job etc., and now if I don't like something on first listen it's unlikely to get a second chance. I often wonder if I'm missing out on some "growers" that may be lurking in recent aquisitions, but I'm stuck in the cycle now.
Me too
I absolutely agree. I've decided to significantly cut down on buying new music as I realised I don't listen to what i do buy unless it pops up on Shuffle. So I'm going to focus on listening to things which I haven't had a good go at yet.
Yes but...
I agree that having more music available means you tend to give it less time - there were several month long periods in my teens when the same shouty punk band's album would get played every single day at least once until I knew it backwards and inside out. However when you can't afford many albums and when you couldn't download them you had to be really choosy about what you bought and I rarely went out on a limb for something a little different. I think I only really branched out from indie and punk into country and hip hop and reggae because of MP3 downloads and I've discovered some amazing stuff after downloading it from emusic on a whim. There are downsides to the mass availability of music but I think the opportunities for discovery it throws up outweighs enough for it to be worth it.
CDs really were that expensive in the 90s
I worked in a record shop up until around 1993, and by today's standards, the price of cds was extortionate. Fourteen and fifteen pounds was the norm. Then you had EMI, who came up with the concept of the double play cd. Basically, a single cd that held 70 minutes plus of music. Basically a double album's worth of material. The ones that stick in my head were Discography by Pet Shop Boys and the Best Of Tina Turner. These would retail at £16.99. Disgraceful. When the Red and Blue Beatles albums were first released on CD, they retailed at £30.99 each, despite the Red album containling little over 65 minutes of music.
Overpriced Beatles
I knew someone back in the very late nineties who bought the Red Beatles Best Of for £20. I thought it seemed way too much but he said it was an okay price. A few weeks later he bought the Blue Best Of. We talked for a few minutes and then it suddenly hit me - HE SPENT £40 ON FOUR CDS! I pointed this out to him and he had to admit that when you think of it that way it was WAY too much. And to think, somewhere out there, a man or a woman has paid £62 for the both of them.
32.99
I paid 32.99 for Richard Thompson 3cd "Watching the Dark" from HMV.I kept the sticker on the front to remind me of the value.
Crazy price.
Box Sets
The most expensive box sets I've ever bought were Chris Rea's "Blue Guitars" (£30 for 11CDs and 1 DVD) and The Gathering's "Sand and Mercury" collection (£30 for 10 CDs).
The most for a 3CD set is Neil Diamond's "Play Me" for £16.
The most for a 2CD album is £13 for various things. It's probably been years since I paid that much.
CD prices
I worked at the Virgin Megastore on Oxford Street in London in the early 90s as a buyer. Chart CDs at the time were £9.99, non chart albums varied between £11.99 and £16.99 for single albums.
At the same time chart vinyl and cassette sold for £6.99.
But you have to remember the Record Companies weren't setting the prices. Your average chart CD was bought by the record shop for about £3.00 per item.......
Nice mark up.....
Sales
What was a typical sale? Two albums for £25 while nowadays it's more likely 3 CDs for £15? Did they even do proper sales or was it just remainder bins full of tat? Was it the dream of a madman to expect to get a Led Zeppelin album for less than £10 in a sale?
Typical sale would be three
Typical sale would be three or albums, setting people back £30 or more. An average 'big' album - your U2s or Simply Reds etc (big at that time...lol) would be ordered in for about 1000 cds, which would sell out in a week or so.
The Retail Price Index has gone up 77% from Jan '90 to March '08
By that reckoning a chart CD that cost £9.99 in 1990 should cost about £17.75 today. As for those £30.99 Beatles CDs, they would be £55 now, if they'd followed the price of everything else. I can't remember the last time I paid more than £9 for a CD of anything.
Has any industry suffered such a catastrophic collapse in prices as this since blacksmiths were done over by the internal combustion engine? I can still remember Gerald Kaufman MP campaigning for cheaper CD prices. I wonder if he could be persuaded out of retirement to campaign for them to be made more expensive?