Hi-Rez Highway

RE: huh?

220.255.2.73

This Post Has Been Edited by the Author

In Reply to: RE: huh? posted by bwb on January 08, 2012 at 08:43:58

You don't own a sacd player yet?
Why do we even need to bother talking to you?
Just kidding. :-)

Let's see...
I bought the sacd samplers directly from the record labels, and I "re-sold" them to 7 or 8 countries in Asia that actively promoted sacd at that time. I made some additional mini sacd technology explanation booklets with information of sacd capable product ranges of that year and that got them inserted into the disc packaging. I use the word "re-sell" because I paid for all the items upfront and invoiced each country later for the number of discs that were delivered to them. But that doesn't really qualify me as a dealer, as I didnt made any profits from this whole endeavor.
The samplers were given as a limited time only promotional item when a sacd capable product was sold. In that first year, 8000 discs went out into the markets over 2 months period. The entire region's sales easily exceed 100k units per year, so to dissipate 8000 discs over a 2 months intensive promotion period really wasn't all that hard. In that last year, middle east countries started to promote sacd - that why the figures shot to 16000 discs.
Does the qty figures sound too fantastic now?

Trainers? Training what?
For the most part, training retail floor staffs how to demo and how to sell home entertainment products, sacd capable or otherwise.
Did those sacd samplers made any significant contribution to the sales of sacd and sacd capable products?
Absolutely. While the samplers probably wasn't the main factor consumers ended up purchasing the sacd capable home entertainment products, they did helped raised awareness to potential customers at the point of purchase, of the added benefits of better music reproduction through those HE products over other competitive HE systems.
Did it helped sacd disc sales subsequently?
Absolutely. For those countries where software dealers actively imports, promote and sold sacds, and for those labels whose titles were included in the 4 samplers - Groovenotes, DMP, Chesky, Hyperion, Concord Jazz, Telarc and EMI. These samplers didn't directly contribute to revenue, but they inspired interested customers to go to music retail stores to buy the entire sacd album in which the sampler tracks were extracted from.

Did the samplers directly contributed to sacd sales figures?
Could had been. Quite a few sacd capable product companies created samplers for the same purposes. Quite possibly the samplers did inflate some of the sales report that came out at that time. But then again, if you looking at the best selling sacd lists on the sacd.net website, the best sellers aren't any samplers at all.

Edits: 01/08/12

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