Website Busted for Selling Hong Kong CD’s
More interestingly, is that people are still buying CD’s.
You can buy the new Maroon 5 CD and thousands of others on CD Wow’s website in the UK for cheaper than you would find on any other UK music site. What CD Wow does is import the cheaper versions that are made for the local Hong Kong market and sell them at their site for what is apparently incredibly low-prices:
CD Wow originally imported cheap CDs from Hong Kong but promised as long ago as 2004 to stop the practice.
However, in March the company was found guilty of continuing the trade and last week was fined £36 million damages and £5 million interest as penalty for its actions.
Yesterday CD Wow — a privately held company with little-known British and European founders — said that the BPI was able to cite only 39 instances of the rules being breached, a fraction of the 10,000 CDs it ships a day.
This was a big thing in Hong Kong 10 years ago about parallel imports, now that Hong Kong lost so much to piracy all the record labels and movie companies had to drop their wholesale prices to compete, and now its so cheap that other countries that don’t have such rampant piracy can capitalize on it.
Our bigger shock than this story was that people in the U.K. still buy physical CD’s and from this one retailer equals 10,000 a day??!!! Even at a discount, how much is Virgin and HMV selling in the UK a day?
