DealsDEAL OF THE DAY (again!): The Beatles / “The US Albums” box set
With just over a week to go until the release date, Amazon UK have reduced The Beatles US Albums box set from £149.99 to £106 (correct at the time of writing).
If you were wavering over placing an order, will this near £50 reduction tempt you to pull the trigger, and place and order? If you do consider doing this, we’d recommend not hesitating for too long, because we can’t see it staying at this price for too long.
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btw, I, having pre-ordered the box from Amazon for quite a while, and to contact them and ‘remind’ them about the pre-order guarantee, so that yesterday they manually lowered th eprice of my order to £106. I had the impression they weren’t going to do that if I hadn’t noticed … Thanks Superdeluxepeople! (and keep an eye on your own pre-order ;) )
I live in Australia I own the first Beatles boxset stereo version and have ordered the US boxset from the US Amazon store. I can’t wait to get this boxset not only does it contain the Hey Jude album but also has major singles on albums, instead of only having these songs on the Past Masters compilation albums.
Paul, further to your comment about paying the VAT to your customs department in the UK, you wonder why you cannot just pay the VAT in advance when ordering from Amazon.ca. Why on earth would Amazon.ca act as a tax collector for the tax department in the UK? Here in Canada we pay goods and services tax of 5% which must be collected by every merchant selling to a customer based in Canada, and then the merchant must remit these taxes to the Canadian tax department every month. It’s a huge amount of time, effort, and expense for merchants to do this for sales in our own country, so why on earth would Amazon.ca do this for sales to other countries? Yes, it’s true, Amazon is everywhere, buy they are separate entities in each country, and from an administrative standpoint it would be impossible for Amazon worldwide to launch a comprehensive tax collecting and remitting operation for all of their entities globally to every customer globally. Unfortunately, when anyone imports goods into their own country, they are at the mercy of their countries duties and sales tax regulations, and that will not ever change.
While on the subject of “The Beatles”, I’m curious if there’s any difference in sound quality between the Japanese edition of “The Capitol Albums Vol. 1” and the version available in the U.S.? A Amazon.com Market Place seller offered the Japanese edition for $10.99 USD + $3.98 USD shipping and I took advantage of the offer.
Still debating on getting the “US Albums” box set and wonder if it will eventually be available as a hybrid/SACD or Blu-ray audio and if so would either format be an improvement as far as sound quality is concerned?
Bought most of the early John Cougar Mellencamp albums on cassettes and CDs when first released. Although I probably won’t order the “1978-2012” 19 CD box set, I’m considering the “1982-1989” set. Both are receiving mostly favorable reviews concerning sound quality.
Paul, looking forward to the SuperDeluxeEdition store and assume offers will be available for international buyers too?
I wonder if this brief price drop was genuine or a mistake? Be very interesting to see if Amazon honors this price… or will pre-orderers be sent an email telling that they will have to reorder at full price.
Won’t be the first time Amazon have screwed up like this.
I would almost guarantee that they will honour it. It wasn’t a mistake just some quirk in their algorithms. It’s amazing really, though. They drop the price to £106 for 10 hours and have to honour that price for every single pre-order. There’s no way they can have sold enough at the low price to make up for the income lost on pre-orders. Amazon don’t appear to have to make a profit, hence no one can compete with them.
wow! lucky I ordered mine last night then.
..and while you’re talking, the price went back to £145.99…
As a Brit, I love the whole context and history of how Americans heard and grew up with these versions (albeit with the reverb removed here) and I am curious to hear that myself. It partly spawned the US garage rock scene after all. I love the different sleeves, box etc, Yes, I will still probably play the mono or stereo box sets more often, but if all I wanted was the basic music I could buy downloads cheaper than any of them. The whole point of these sets is the full package. I doubt Apple will be bothered if no-one in Britiain bought it at all, as it is obviously aimed at the US market where I would imagine sales will be brisk.
On Amazon, I’ve never used the Canadian one but I have used US Amazon several times and always the items took five weeks to arrive and looked like someone had jumped up and down on them during transit, requiring a refund each time (no quibbles there, excellent customer services). If I buy from US Amazon Market place sellers, which I have dozens and dozens of times however, I have never had a complaint, the stuff arrives quickly and well packaged.
You can actually spent quite a high amount of money without being liable for import duty, but if you go above £17 you ARE liable for VAT if you are based in the UK ordering from Amazon.ca. What annoys me is that if you *want* to pay the VAT in advance there appears to be no way of doing this. Then when it gets stopped at customs you have to pay the VAT and an extortionate admin charge. If you are ordering from Amazon.ca there doesn’t appear to be an alternative to ‘taking a chance’!?
It is not the fault of amazon.ca for the customs charges, it is UK customs, and by rights we know we should have to pay them, we just hope we can grab a bargain and avoid them. I lived in New Zealand for a while and they amazon.co.uk ran a promotion where it was free postage + no VAT, so it was 20% cheaper to buy items from amazon.co.uk living in NZ, than it was living here in the UK. Stocked op on a few SDE boxes (U2, Nirvana) before I came back!
I agree with Lenny. The box-set is going to be far more relevant to an American audience that experienced these originally and will have limited appeal as a package to those elsewhere, what with the heavily duplicated 2009 audio.
The price doesn’t reflect good value for what I would be getting new, which would essentially be a set of replica sleeves.
I won’t be buying it, but for me, the chance to own a mini replica of the infamous Yesterday and Today sleeve is enough for me to buy that album individually for £10 as a novelty and a companion piece to the mono box.
That is a huge drop in price for the UK, frankly it’s worth a gamble at this price! Thanks for the info! :-)
All of you guys complaining about Amazon.ca, I live in Canada therefore for me it’s fast, easy, reliable, and local. I have some of the same issues that Phil is complaining about when I buy internationally from Amazon.UK. It’s all about where you live mates! Also, with respect to all the complaints about the US versions of Beatles albums being poorly done and bad value for the money, all you Brits need to understand that while this may be true, we here in North America bought and grew up with the albums in their US formats, so while I won’t argue your valid points, you should understand that for people like myself, it’s a blast from our past to have the albums on CD in these versions, and we are reliving our youth by having them. You guys don’t need to buy this new box set because the US versions mean nothing to you.
I also preordered at amazon.ca but have cancelled and switched to the UK one. I have ordered a number of times from amazon.ca, and every time have been hit for customs chargers. They usually deliver through DHL, once they dropped off the parcel at work (at reception, not with me) and then I received an invoice through the post for the customs charge, and their fee. I think customs make a bee-line for anything with amazon on, and they display the value on the box. Once, I used a voucher (received during the Smashing Pumpkins Mellon Collie price error, when they sent me a $40 voucher, but didn’t show I used this on the outside of the box). I managed to get them to refund me enough to cover the import charges, but to me, the risk is just too great. Also, I once ordered some ACDC Back in Black collectors edition tins. EVERY ONE was damaged when I received them as they had used no protective packaging just a cardboard box. It seems they treat international orders no differently to Canadian ones (though .uk do that too). To me its not worth the risk as I may end up paying more, it may be damaged and it will certainly take longer to arrive.
Paul can I ask do you have any affiliation with Amazon? I only ask since almost all your links are to them, and all your Deals of the Day are linked to them too. It’s just that you also bemoan (and rightly so) the death of the record store, and yet things like this don’t really help. Don’t take it the wrong way, I don’t mean this in a malicious way and I love this site to bits.
This blog has a global audience – UK, US, Germany, French, Japan, Australia, Canada etc. The reality (whether we like it or not) is that Amazon has become the dominate global music store online. So by trying to connect to as much of the audience as possible we end up mainly using amazon as the reference point. That is where most people shop, often comparing prices across stores. People regularly leave comments about Sainsbury’s pricing but they only ship to the UK, which is only about 33% of the SDE audience.
However it’s not all about the big players. I will soon be launching a SuperDeluxeEdition store which will offer (amongst other things) small labels a platform from which to sell their deluxe products direct to consumers and hopefully help them achieve healthier profit margins than they would get from selling on Amazon. I’m quite excited about that actually, so stay tuned!
Wow that sounds fantastic Paul. Thanks for the giving such a genuine answer to my question.
You’re welcome. You may have noticed I posted about the forthcoming store yesterday. P
Why on Earth anyone would want these clearly inferior versions from the USA is beyond me. Capitol Records gutted everything up to Pepper as a cash grab at the expense of the fans. Now it’s being done again with this collection. How gullible are some people? Well, wait till they release all of these again but this time with all black & white covers! Bet some fools would be exited about that too.
What happened to the previews you were posting?
Back tomorrow for the rest of the week.
This is a product for people with too much money.
Yeah, I got the same email about the John Mellencamp too….
Be careful of Amazon Canada, ordered the John Mellencamp box set as it’s an absolute bargain on their site, received an email today, they are trying to get stock would I like to cancel ??? It’s only just been released, makes you wonder…….
Big deal on the price reduction! I ordered it for $128 on Canadian Amazon.ca the day it was listed. That’s like a price of 70 GBP.
Just can’t see the point of his set if it’s the same audio versions as we already have … even at this improved price.
It’s not quite the same though. Some unique US edits are included. Admittedly a small percentage, but you aren’t JUST buying the 2009 versions all over again. And the packaging is pretty special. Obviously, overall the package (music & packaging) is nothing like as compelling as the mono box, but at around £100 it’s tempting enough.