Content area
Full Text
Marketing: mail-order music firms now offer quick delivery from huge collections to frustrated record buyers
IN THE past, if you wanted to obtain a song but hadn't caught its name, your best chance was to pop along to the local record shop and hum it. Now you might be better advised to contact one of the growing band of mail-order suppliers.
Curiously, perhaps, at a time when more and more specialist radio stations are hitting the airwaves, the serious fan of classical, jazz or country music is finding that the national chains tend to stock only a small selection of the recordings available. Some stations have started catering for this demand by offering to supply any records they play by mail, so long as listeners can say when they heard them.
If this move proves successful, it should provide encouragement to proponents of teleshopping. As Alan Price of Blackmail - part of the west London independent record label Demon - acknowledges, several years ago people were "deeply suspicious" about buying records through the post. In some cases, postal orders were sent off to addresses advertised in the music press, but the goods would never arrive.
Now,...