Ayumi Hamasaki Sekai - View Single Post - New album (January 2023)
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Old 13th August 2022, 10:00 PM
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rainbow_smile rainbow_smile is offline
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Join Date: Oct 2010
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Quote:
Originally Posted by sxesven View Post
I can't help but imagine it must affect physical sales? I also do some small-time label running with tapes of experimental electronics and shipping them has become ridiculously prohibitive. Shipping from the US to anywhere already became hugely expensive a few years ago, so ordering stuff there became significantly less interesting (you'd pay $15 shipping for a $5 tape), but now The Netherlands has also followed suit, unfortunately. Unless you buy a lot of stuff, shipping just kills you. And VAT is also charged more regularly now, sometimes (more often than not in the 00s) you'd get lucky and you didn't have to pay any fees, but now 9 times out of 10 I'm charged hefty import duties.
Interestingly enough, physical sales in kpop seemed to increase quite a lot in 2020-2021, but I guess that's partially because online fansigns became a thing during covid

Quote:
Originally Posted by LOONAppears View Post
Ah, really? I didn’t know that… I always assumed they adjusted it based on the shipping prices since sites with lower priced albums seemed to have higher shipping and vice versa, but correlation ≠ causation it seems
Some shopping sites inflate the price to include the shipping fees in it, and then pretend like their shipping fees are low (*cough* cokodive *cough*, but iirc even yesasia used to do it with their jpop albums), but none of them lower it compared to the actual face value aka the prices at physical stores

Quote:
Originally Posted by ~angel*ayumi~ View Post
Not only because of Covid, to my country there is still ni airmal/EMS available from Japan because of the war, the normal flight route to Europe is over Russia, and nobody fly over Russia atm
While the war might've changed shipping method availability, I don't think I've noticed any shipping fee increase after it started... Although I wouldn't be surprised if it happened eventually, since petrol is involved