Robert Fripp

Robert Fripp's Diary

Thursday 27 April 2000

This mornings reading Blakes Enneagram

14.33
This morning's reading: Blake's "Enneagram" & Chana's "From Handel To Hendrix". And guitar practising.

Yesterday's Rapid Acculturation program: "Romeo Is Dead" - Jet Li is my kind of action guy - "Mission to Mars" & "American Psycho".

A point in reference to buying online, and how much cheaper it is to buy through (for example) Amazon.com as opposed to Tower Records or, even, DGM mail order. For example, the ProjeKcts Box Set. Perhaps customers are not aware that Amazon don't have to make a profit: they trade at a loss to establish market position & increase capitalvalue. Bricks & mortar companies don't have this latitude: they have to make a trading profit to stay in business. Some firms (even bricks & mortar) sell DGM releases as a loss leader. DGM can't sell our records for less than our costs to attract customers: we have nothing else to sell them. I'm not saying that anyone should pay more than they need to for a DGM record. But I am saying that if all DGM releases were bought via Amazon.com we'd be out of business within 6 months.

What strategies are there for dealing with this? One example: not to release a record through stores. For a shop release, we supply our distributors; they sell them wholesale to record stores, including virtual stores. Virtual stores sell them at a loss. So, the only way to prevent virtual stores loss-leading is not to supply them. Which means not to supply our distributors. One example of this is DGM re-releasing "The Great Deceiver" via DGM mail order.

DISCOVER THE DGM HISTORY
.

1940s
1950s
1960s
1970s
1980s
1990s
2000s
2010s
.