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

29th Jun 2017, 10:51 AM
	Magic Marmalade If you're not lost... It's not an adventure! Member since Jun 2014 3774 Points Moderator	I think the problem boils down to the fact that we are trying to apply logic to the illogical... Where, in the pre-CD age, release patterns followed very logical and set methods, according to defined producers and markets, which were evident in the releases, and which the releases were themselves evidence of, the expansion of markets proceeding from political arrangements (European Union expansion and integration, and other International agreements, and trade deals) has muddied the waters somewhat. And different arrangements and practices of the above are evident between labels and label groups at the same time, and even this has been a very fluid situation, and so some logic that applied to one particular label one year may not be true the next... (If Sony / Universal gobbled it up, and by virtue of this, conferred access to it's greater markets than the label itself previously sold to.) ...so you may find the "same" CD with same cat and even bar-code, but with an additional code or new marking on it... or maybe not at all. I have some CDs (Ray Lamontagne: Trouble, Robert Plant: Mighty Rearranger, and Ocean Colour Scene: Mosley Shoals), where it is evident that the situation was that the album (CD) was locally produced in the first instance (UK), in order to be financially efficient, but when these CDs sold well, they were effectively "kicked upstairs" to a Central European manufacturer, who could handle the higher capacity, and sell it to a broader market. The other exceptions being, that Australia once made a much higher percentage of it's own CDs for it's own market, more recently, probably for "cost cutting" reasons, more of the European issues were simply sold there... (Likely to boost ((mask)) falling sales within Europe, so they can say that they are selling just as much of the European issues as ever - even though they have simply expanded the market for that issue) ...And Italy, which apparently kept a pretty tight control of it's release market, and resisting joining the broader European show (until recently) ((I think later SIAE stamped Italian issues may be required at some stage to be re-integrated with European releases)) So what you have folks, is globalisation of capitalism expressed in CD form = A mess. (no wonder the global ecomnomy is in the sh*%£er ) There are a couple of existing site features which could be very telling, if integrated: CDs by year (graph) CDs by country. If you could look at the "by year" graph, and further break it down into a graph "by country (Europe + International too), and then overlay these graphs somehow, in order to see the progression from one state of affairs to the other, I'd wager you'd see a movement from the consistent, set patterns of logic we know from vinyle dayes, through the nineties as an increasingly messy, complicated fudge, with no single market logic prevailing. (It won't just move from UK, to Europe, to International). Omni-shambles anyone?