High Street Shopping for CC??

[Gary S]

I had a walk around an HMV store this morning and thought I'd have a look see for any CC albums.

Well it took a while but found a few, with most of them hidden amongst Rock/Pop (Josh Groban, Paul Potts, Joe McElderry), Folk (Alfie Boe???) or Easy Listening (Katherine, Hayley, Sarah and Vanessa Mae).

The only CC I found under Classical (not perfect but better) was Mary-Jess, one of the artists I could possibly forgive them for.

This is not the first time I have struggled to find any CC on the store racks. You would have thought with the increase in popularity of CC the stores would sort things out and encourage sales. It's no wonder most sales are on the net nowadays.

[nicola]

There is an overall confusion of where to put CC artists. Generally, they're mostly put into the Easy Listening section. In my library (I'm a librarian!) all of the CC artists are put under Easy Listening. And I arrange them so all my profiled artists are at the front on display. They have Laura Wright under folk - but they categorise on an album basis - not the artist. To be fair, that Laura Wright album is a folk album.

I'm curious which Alfie Boe album they put into folk, though! Joe McElderry is better known as a pop singer - so that's not a surprise. I suspect you saw Josh Groban's latest album in pop - his older ones are generally put into Easy Listening.

The only one I am a bit confused by is Paul Potts in pop and Vanessa Mae in Easy Listening!

CC is too small to have its own category in a high street shop and most of the CC audience are casual buyers - they buy their CDs from Tescos and other supermarkets, not a specialist (and expensive!) music store.

[John]

HMV obviously don't have a consistent policy within their own organization. Usually I find artists such as Aled, Alfie, Andrea, Il Divo, Katherine, Hayley and Vanessa-Mae in the Classical section. Sarah is more often in Easy Listening. I rarely venture into the Rock/Pop section.
Although prices are generally high, those are not consistent either. I recently bought Aled's new album at a reasonable price and Libera's Christmas album was cheaper than Amazon.

There are occasional gems elsewhere. I found an indoor market stall in Truro with quite a good CC section - mixed new and secondhand. They even had signed copies of Paradiso.

Charity shops (no shortage of those nowadays) are also often worth a look, though their CD collections are rarely well organized. My latest purchase was Josh Groban's self-titled album from Oxfam.

[dfwtexan42]

Disorganized CD display racks, lacking an CC section, are nothing new around here. The last of the big record chain stores (Tower Records, FYE, Virgin) shut down about 10 years ago, and the CD sections of Best Buy and Walmart have been rapidly shrinking since. Josh Groban is labeled as Top 40 here, not surprising given his strong record sales. Generally, if it's not Pop Top 40, you can forget finding it an an retailer. Although we do also have an Country and Latin section. (Hey, this is Texas) Classical and Easy Listening sections are thin slivers, if they exist at all. CC does not exist in the retail or public mindset.

Barnes & Noble record department used to be considered small, but compared to what is left at the Big Box stores, they often have the better selection. We still have about half an dozen decent sized used record shops in the Dallas-Ft Worth area, if you want out of print material.

[Bob M]

I had the same problem Jerry. When I first started looking for cc artists at our local music shops, it was akin to looking for a needle in a haystack . Albums, few as they were, could be found under many different categories including classical, pop, new age, international and folk . Since then, I use Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk almost exclusively or purchase directly from the artist's website using Paypal. Absolutely no problems since migrating to Internet purchasing . The only recent in-store purchases were Jackie's "Dream with Me" and Michael Buble's "Christmas" as Target exclusively sold the extended versions of these albums .