The leaves are beginning to turn, the holiday buying season is approaching, and the fancy of a strapping young international record conglomerate is turning to–raising record prices.
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These releases will certainly be joined by others as the Christmas season looms. Price-increase cycles in the industry have always worked this way: so-called “superstar” releases soften up retailers and consumers, and then most new releases up their prices to the new standard, and then catalog titles continue the trend. The major labels are assisted in this almost annual ritual by two factors: one economic, one social.
Accordingly, the wholesale price to Chicago’s Tower Records is just under $11 for the new Neil Young album. The store’s record sales manager, Joe Kvidera, notes that a year ago $16.98 was reserved for the Madonnas and Garth Brookses of the world. “Now, anything with any chance of selling is coming out at $16.98,” he says. “That used to be the ‘superstar’ price. Now there’s a new supersuperstar pricing [$17.98]. And yet consumers are being told that prices are coming down because retailers are taking a loss.” Kvidera is referring to the price war between traditional retailers like Tower and Rose and your Best Buys and Circuit Citys, which often sell below wholesale price.
A final twist on industry pricing: Classical titles, like sound tracks, are traditionally priced a dollar more than those by top rock acts. But for Three Tenors in Concert 1994–the album chronicling the Pavarotti-Domingo-Carreras Dodgers Stadium gig–middlebrow classical-music fans are getting hit with a $19.98 list! “Traditionally,” Kvideras says, “record companies have said these are specialty markets; they had to charge more because they had less sales. On the other hand, their justification for the superstar artists is that more people want them, so they charge more for that, too.”
