What’s going on with Amazon?

It used to be, in a pinch, and with Amazon Prime, I could get most any major release delivered within two days.

Now I notice that many CDs are available only from offsite dealers, a good many of those that are actually in stock – as in, actually shipping from Amazon – are now ridiculously overpriced, and of those, many won’t be delivered for at least three days. Not all, mind you, but many.

And I’m not talking about unknown artists on tiny labels. I’m talking about Sir Neville Marriner and Sir Colin Davis on London/Decca and Philips, evergreen recordings made in the 1980s that have never been out of the catalogue. I would say it seems like Amazon is really trying to push everyone to its streaming, which personally I won’t do and is not really helpful in instances when I want to send a gift.

The claim could be parroted that the CD is on the way out, but the fact of the matter is that CD sales have actually been on the rise the past few years, and most classical music folks still want their physical media.

Quit trying to drive the market, corporations. There are still millions of us out there who want to collect, want to fill out our music libraries, want quick access to libretti and intelligently written liner notes, enjoy cover art, appreciate the ease of programming multimovement works, want to be able to play CDs in our cars, and not to be constantly lashed to the internet!

I do most of my CD shopping with online specialty dealers these days, many of them overseas, or close to home at Princeton Record Exchange. But when I need it quick, with guaranteed shipping, Amazon has always been a convenient fallback, both for gift-giving and for a hard-pressed radio programmer.

This recent increase in asspainery isn’t just limited to CDs. A few weeks ago, I received a notice from Amazon that something is going on with their magazine subscriptions too, and I’ll now have to look elsewhere for Opera News.

Of course, I won’t let it hinder my consumption. The fact that classical music continues to be so marginalized only makes me want to pad my libraries even more. Outlets like Amazon are just going to get an even slenderer slice of the pie.

I’ll have to make sure to start planning my Christmas shopping a little earlier this year. For Amazon, I guarantee two-day shipping for the back of my hand and my whisky breath.