Post by Frank BergerPost by Mark ZimmerPost by OscarUniversal Music Enterprises has a better track record of re-introducing
its big boxes than, say, Sony. For example, UME raised from the dead
Mercury Living Presence, Vol.1 in 2013 for a second printing. Sony, by
contrast, has let its you-had-yr-chance Gary Graffman box go OOP _and_
have you seen A Boy Named Gould in the last 18 months for anything less
than $400? Marquee star we’re talking. Was in and out of print for less
than two years.
Didn't the Monteux box go out of print very quickly as well? I know it
hadn't been out very long when it was already $400-500 on the secondary
market.
One the one hand it seems like it could make economic sense for a label
to let some material go OOP quickly. If most people who are going to
buy do it quickly (a narrowly defined fan base), it might not pay to
keep it production.
The Reiner big box was reprinted, after quickly going out of print. I
changed my mind about buying the 2015 Gould complete box and the 2016
Brendel box but now they are out of print. The Mercury Living Presence 3
box set from 2015 has already revoked the website listed in the booklet
for downloading some liner notes; so how's that argument that printed notes
are unimportant and wasteful and that depending on fly by night websites
should be preferred? The third Mercury boxset, with more of the no names
I crave, whetted my appetite for the first two box sets but they are out
of print (I prefer the "big names" in their own complete box sets, not a
few of each of their recordings crammed into boxsets along with the
rarities).
The Graffman and Entremont boxes were defective as issued, and you need to
awkwardly contact Sony to get 1 CD replacement for Entremont and 2 CDs
for Graffman. The culprits for the editing defects are Meyer for one box
and b sharp for the other and Sony for not being clear about how to get
replacements (this information should be in the printed booklet on how
to contact the record company but the contacts in the booklet are for
sellers, not buyers; amazon or a record store is not going to contact
Sony for me).
Post by Frank BergerOTOH, if you really do say secondary market taking place at such
elevated prices, shouldn't that indicate a continuing viable market? On
the third hand (?) may the number of such transactions are very, very
low.
A key point: high price lists, no matter how many providers are offering it,
do not indicate what price they are actually selling at because the high
priced item may not have had *any* copies sold at that price. Sites like
discogs.com report the prices of sales on it's site, and many high priced
high demand items have had *no* sales, whether it's rare or have many sellers
listed.