the mad scene

Thanks to globalisation and the Western conglomerates’ eventual realization that China is indeed a substantial for classical music market, stores in these parts of the world have been treated in recent years to made-in-China releases of back-catalogue titles, presumerably priced moderately for the Chinese markets but considered cheap in more developed economies such as Singapore’s, which is a great relief to consumers after having been held ransom to exhorbitant prices by record companies and retail outlets over the years. Whereas a European DVD release of Thomas Hampson’s Macbeth can go for 90 Singapore dollars (approx USD130), its equivalent Chinese release goes at 15 dollars (or roughly USD22). A steal by any standards!

However, cheap goods do come at a price on some of these releases, depending on each individual title: missing bonus features, subtitles only in Chinese, or seriously ‘creative’ English subtitles are just some defects you may encounter, but I am ready to overlook them since the cost savings are so great.

Unfortunately, due to our relatively small market for classical music products in these parts, the range available is pretty small. This is not the case in Taiwan, whose much bigger population justifies stocking up on products. Therefore you can understand how wild I went when hitting the stores, picking up no less than 7 DVDs and one CD in the span of 2 days!

It should be noted that these DVDs were purchased at regular CD stores, not at specialised classical music outlets or music megastores like HMV or Virgin. Unfortunately (or fortunately) I couldn’t find any CDs or my poor card would have suffered a lot more.

Of course this presents another problem that many working professionals face: got time to buy, no time to watch! Thankfully, I have the Christmas and New Year holidays to hole-up at home and recover from swiping my card one too many times. Who needs to party really, when you have Eva Marton, Domingo, Bartoli and co to keep you company?

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 30th, 2007 at 10:05 am and is filed under Ramblings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.