TELL TALE SIGNS PART 103
Among earlier discussions of disgust about the pricing of the third CD there was a certain amount of cynical speculation about whether that price would soon fall, making early purchasers even more ripped-off than they were going to be in the first place. Well, that pricing slipperiness seems to have started already. Here's what one fan wrote in to John Baldwin's Desolation Row Information Service yesterday:
"I was in Cambridge for work on Thursday. Went into the Fopp store there (part of their national indie chain here in the UK), and found copies of the deluxe edition of TTS on sale for £85.00. Bearing in mind I ordered mine from bobdylan.com, believing at the time that mail order of one sort or another was the only guaranteed way of getting such, and paying I guess £93.00, plus whatever I will probably have to pay on import tax, I was a bit p***sed off.
Now to compound the issue, I've had an e-mail from amazon.com (that is, the US one) saying it's down to $99.00 already, which with postage to the UK would be around £60.00, I guess!!!!!!
...This begs the question(s), how limited is the limited edition, and are Sony just ripping us all off? Or only two or three days after the release date, have they spotted that the prohibitive price is putting customers off?"
As for the quality of the material itself, another DesRow correspondent seems to sum up the general view like this:
"Is the de-luxe version worth the extra cash? Logically, no. I'll never open the picture book of vinyl single sleeves ever again, Ratso Sloman's disjointed ramblings are not a patch on John Bauldie's commentary to Bootleg 1-3, and as for that third CD - it's probably the weakest of the three. Unfortunately, all put together, it's essential to have, if you can get over that feeling of having been mugged."
Personally, I'm not ready to judge the quality of the tracks yet - I've hardly had time to listen to them - but I feel nothing but contempt for the way they have been marketed at us, and I'm not going to be buying an official copy.
"I was in Cambridge for work on Thursday. Went into the Fopp store there (part of their national indie chain here in the UK), and found copies of the deluxe edition of TTS on sale for £85.00. Bearing in mind I ordered mine from bobdylan.com, believing at the time that mail order of one sort or another was the only guaranteed way of getting such, and paying I guess £93.00, plus whatever I will probably have to pay on import tax, I was a bit p***sed off.
Now to compound the issue, I've had an e-mail from amazon.com (that is, the US one) saying it's down to $99.00 already, which with postage to the UK would be around £60.00, I guess!!!!!!
...This begs the question(s), how limited is the limited edition, and are Sony just ripping us all off? Or only two or three days after the release date, have they spotted that the prohibitive price is putting customers off?"
As for the quality of the material itself, another DesRow correspondent seems to sum up the general view like this:
"Is the de-luxe version worth the extra cash? Logically, no. I'll never open the picture book of vinyl single sleeves ever again, Ratso Sloman's disjointed ramblings are not a patch on John Bauldie's commentary to Bootleg 1-3, and as for that third CD - it's probably the weakest of the three. Unfortunately, all put together, it's essential to have, if you can get over that feeling of having been mugged."
Personally, I'm not ready to judge the quality of the tracks yet - I've hardly had time to listen to them - but I feel nothing but contempt for the way they have been marketed at us, and I'm not going to be buying an official copy.
posted by Michael Gray | 11:10 am
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