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Topic: CD Albums: Time To Bite The Bullet Pt. 1 The Problem

20th May 2017, 4:37 AM
	PhilMH SUBS Member since Jan 2012 1058 Points	Alenko wrote: There is a difference between place issued and place distributed. We should not add International to albums that were sold in Australia, for example, even if they were sold under regular price. I'm sorry my friends from down under, but it seems to me you get a lot of imports (CDs that have no mentioning of Australia anywhere on the release, hence not Australian issues), even if they have regular price. Those albums were distributed in Australia, not issued there. How many more times do I have to explain this? The "imports" that Lee and I and others frequently refer to are those that were distributed in Australia by the Australian branches of the multinational companies, so for all intents and purposes they were Australian releases as well as UK/Europe/whatever, included in (historically) the Platterlog catalogue's weekly new release sheets as releases from those companies, and (currently) on the Australian Record Industry Association's website which shows the new releases each Friday (as well as on their subscription newsletter, which I don't get). A current example is that the ARIA site a couple of weeks ago listed the Ella Fitzgerald centennial collection on Verve as a new release through Universal that week; go to a shop and what you find is the European pressing. I think I have also used before the example of Universal's predecessor PolyGram releasing in Australia discs that were made in South Korea in packages that were outwardly European, with catalogue numbers and barcodes that were the same as Europe. I don't want to imagine what sort of reception you would get from Universal or the other companies if you tried to tell them that these aren't Australian releases. Both of those examples most definitely qualify as International, as would a lot of others, especially in the 80s when a lot of countries had few, if any, CD factories. (I might just mention that a lot of CBS, later Sony, Austrian pressings were released in Australia too). I suspect that a lot of entries listed on CD World (and both LPs and CDs on Classical World) currently listed as Europe (and a lesser amount of US pressings) would in fact be International releases. Unfortunately there are very few CDs which list all the countries where the company's affiliates were releasing the item - in a lot of cases, there wouldn't have been room! Many of us here in Australia have decades of experience as buyers (and in the case of member The_Vinyl_Junkie, as a retailer) and have seen plenty of overseas pressings in regular, non-"import" record shops, and we shouldn't have to be subject to an at times near-impossible burden of "proof" to satisfy some of the more Northern Hemisphere-centric contributors that a particular item was released here. Having said all that, Lee's final suggestion above, a disc being listed as from a particular region but having the ability to list multiple countries of release, is the closest to my feelings on how to resolve the issue, though I'm not sure my Korean-pressed discs would fit neatly into that. If the particular CD wasn't already listed, I would most likely add it as Australia, and then other countries' pressings with the same catalogue number and barcode combination could be added by selecting the appropriate flag.