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Topic: Inconsistencies In The International Category

16th Dec 2015, 9:51 AM
	RogerFoster To ignore is human, to follow is divine. Member since Jul 2014 3084 Points	I think that considering "Country of Purchase" is a very red herring!! Here in Merrie Olde England most big cities (and some quite small towns) had record shops that stocked US imports way back before CDs were even dreamt about. The practice seems to have started around the late '60s due to demand from fans of "specialist" music styles for recordings that the UK record companies had either not yet issued or that were now out of print in the UK. This was done by the individual record shops ordering direct from US distributors, having set up some sort of deal. The imports tended to be on sale at about 30-50% more than UK releases. For a few years the UK recording industry tried to curb the practice, but then there was a period around 1974 when a boom in sales of 45s coincided with a shortage of vinyl (probably due to the "oil-crisis" of 1973/4) and some UK subsidiaries of the US record companies solved this by importing copies of their hot new releases direct from the US. As an example I recall that my copy of "Rock The Boat" by Hues Corporation, bought in a "normal" UK record shop at the "normal" price was actually a US pressing. This continued into the 1980s and the CD era, and as this coincided with the international spread of retailers like HMV, Virgin, Tower and Borders the boundaries got even more blurred as they would have had their own internal distribution networks. I don't, as an example, recall there being much difference between what was on sale in the Virgin Megastore in Milan and the ones in London, or between the HMV in New York and the London ones.