TCB-FAN wrote: ↑Mon Oct 21, 2024 12:54 am
dougkapp wrote: ↑Sun Oct 20, 2024 9:36 pm
What I meant by restrictions is that many dealers refuse to sell outside Europe. It's as simple as that. It's not that there are restrictions imposed on these dealers, it's that they refuse to ship outside Europe. This restricts FTD's sales.
But allowing IMusic and Amazon to sell FTD wouldn't damage the label at all.
The idea of digitizing all past & future FTD releases into streaming formats, including Amazon, i-Tunes, Spotify (even on an exclusive FTD website at a higher premium per say $2.00 per track) would not only make a boatload of sense, but also very viable, but alas, common sense isn't so common these days.
P.S. Right now I could not find a trustworthy dealer if my life depended on it to buy the new set on a whim, even though the release has been out for over a week. I'm still on the hunt for a copy...I'll even settle for a used copy at a reasonable price.
Whilst selling on Amazon and offering releases on digital platforms would seem like a good idea, the downside to that would be at the expense of existing dealers/clubs who rely on FTD sales to boost their income. And that’s probably why FTD’s original idea was to only allow their releases to go to Elvis dealers and clubs so that as Elvis fans, they benefit, as opposed to huge conglomerates like Amazon and iTunes etc.
Also, I do not think the quality of the majority of soundboard releases is good enough to go into mainstream for physical product. - what hardcore Elvis collectors will accept is not the same as what the casual purchaser will accept, so I could see any casual buyers going back to the shop where they bought them asking for a refund.
I don’t think there is an easy solution now to boost sales and I’m not sure that even if FTD themselves wanted to start selling directly that there is enough demand to spread things around - the cost to employ someone to look after and control the sales would simply be another cost to cover which even if it led to a slight increase in sales would only go to the cost of employing someone. And once again, any sales from FTD directly would affect dealers.
Putting the best sounding/complete shows from the back catalogue soundboards on digital platforms may be an option and would help prevent some dealers charging high prices for out of print releases, but that would only work if fans were happy to just have the recordings without the packaging. The same could apply to the Classic Album series. But Sony/FTD would need to do what other companies do with certain releases and that’s to make them available as "only full album" available for download which would stop people cherry picking individual tracks and ensure that a decent return on sales is made.
All of that aside, I’m curious to know why you are having a problem in finding a trustworthy dealer for this latest release as your comment implies none are trustworthy. And in what way are you suggesting they not trustworthy.
. Bye for now 
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