Best Buy is all out of the Liberace box set - now what?
Written: Aug 28 '01 (Updated Aug 28 '01)
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The Bottom Line
at least use CDnow.com for searching and listening to samples to get a thorough evaluation of new cds you may purchase
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So Amazon.com is too expensive, or your hometown retailers are out of stock on the cd you want. Leaving the house to search around isn’t an option for you? Then try CDnow.com! Not only do they have a great selection, a user-friendly site with tons of song samples (in many formats), they also have reasonable prices as well. Oh, there are just gobs of reasons to replace amazon.com with CDnow.com as your online cd store – I’ll delve into a few of them.
First: do you have your pants on? (that isn’t a requirement to shop there, but it’s just a poll I’m taking. Email your answer to chacha69@popstar.com - thanks).
I actually buy a lot of my cds at buy.com because of the low prices, but I have to admit that I use CDnow.com to complete that process, and sometimes I decide to just buy from them instead. Here’s why:
Availability
If all you wanted was the new N’Sync cd (and who doesn’t??), you would most likely go to Best Buy, Walmart, or some other retailer in your neighborhood because the chances are, it’s on sale and they have four facings of it in the racks. But when the time comes that you want to purchase Live Fast, Diarrhea by the Vandals (and believe me, that time will come), that cd is nowhere to be found around town. This is where online retailers excel – availability. My experience with big stores is that they mostly stock newer releases, and they also cater to well-known artists. If I wanted to find the first Monster Magnet cd at Best Buy, I will probably be out of luck – the third Smashing Pumpkins cd, I’m golden. CDnow has a great variety of artists available, and they usually have every release by an artist listed for sale on their site unless it’s out of print or an indie release (which they can’t help).
Samples
A lot of the time, when you are in the market for buying cds online, it is because you are just surfing around for something new to listen to. Maybe you read a review here at epinions about how great a band is that you never heard of, or maybe a friend suggested an album to you and you’d like to check it out. Well, let’s face it – some people just have different tastes in music. What sounds good to me may not sound good to you. And it really blows when you spend $15 on a cd that came “Highly Recommended” to you, but in reality sucks a big one.
Wouldn’t it be nice to hear samples of the songs before you bought the cd? I’ve got news for you: Best Buy employees don’t like it when you rip cds out the shrink wrap and put them in the floor display stereos for a test spin. What’s nice about CDnow is that they have the best collection of 30-second song samples I’ve seen on ANY internet music retailer’s site. Seriously. They put Amazon to shame simply because CDnow has mpeg and Windows Media formats, whereas Amazon just has Real Audio samples. And they put buy.com to shame simply because CDnow actually HAS song samples. I’ve made many a nice cd discovery by listening to samples of new artists and purchasing the cd on the strength of those samples.
Prices
While CDnow doesn’t boast having the best prices of any online store (well, if they do they’d be lying because buy.com has the lowest overall prices), they certainly don’t gouge your pockets like Sam Goody’s Musicland does, and they usually beat out Amazon in pricing for albums, although not always. Here’s some examples (I tried to throw in a variety of random albums old & new so as not to be biased):
Take Off Your Pants and Jackets by Blink 182:
CDnow.com = $13.28
Amazon.com = $16.99
The Best of Donny Osmond by Donny Osmond:
CDnow.com = $9.49
Amazon.com = $9.97
J. Lo by Jennifer Lopez
CDnow.com = $13.28
Amazon.com = $13.99
Too Shy by Kajagoogoo
CDnow.com = $11.49
Amazon.com = $11.97
For fun, I put the Kajagoogoo cd in my shopping cart on both store sites so I could get shipping costs as well, here are the results:
CDnow shipping = $2.99 (for a grand total of $14.48 with the cd price)
Amazon shipping = $2.98 (for a grand total of $14.95 with the cd price)
Not a huge difference, but every penny counts. Plus, if you look at the Blink 182 price difference, that is pretty significant. Also, Amazon likes to send things by UPS, and I hate that because I’m usually not home to receive the package.
Searching
The site is pretty user-friendly when it comes to searching for something. You can search by song title, album title, artist, or record label (which can be pretty useful if you have a favorite record label such as Kung-Fu Records or Fat Wreck Chords, which both are specific to punk music). You can browse by genre, or see what’s topping the charts to make your selections. Also, you can search their music downloads and buy digitally formatted songs for your hard drive for about $1 - $1.50.
When you do a search, you get a pretty nice listing of selections that are usually relevant or somewhat close to the phrase/name you typed in the search window. I’ve done searches on buy.com that got me nowhere near what I was looking for, yet the same phrase gets me exactly what I want on CDnow or Amazon. Bizarre.
Overall, I’d have to say that CDnow.com has their act together pretty well. It’s an easy site to use, the prices are good, and they really give you more tools for making buying decisions on cds than any other site does (the song samples are a HUGE plus).
Now, I hope I didn’t accidentally purchase that Kajagoogoo cd for real…….
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
st3on1ey1baby
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Member: tammy rocks
Location: Tempe, AZ
Reviews written: 84
Trusted by: 134 members
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